Grounded

Corey Lawrence has a deep connection to the Earth. He’s always loved being outside, and having a career that allows him to do fieldwork in one of the most beautiful places in the country is a dream come true. He’s a biogeochemist at the U.S. Geological Survey, where he studies carbon storage in the soil. But he didn’t follow a straight line to get here.

As an undergraduate, he was on the path to computer engineering because according to a guidance counselor, computer science was the it vocation. But it didn’t take long for him to switch to biology, knowing it could take him to places where he could mountain bike, his lifetime passion. He applied for an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant, hoping to do the program at RMBL, but he ended up in Alaska, not a bad second choice. There, he fell in love with biochemistry.

Eventually, he ended up at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he received his PhD in geosciences, studying the amount of dust blown in from the Colorado Plateau and deposited in the San Juan Mountains.

Down to earth

That piqued Dr. Lawrence’s interest in how soils form and what factors control their chemistry. He also became curious about how the chemistry of soils varies across the landscape.

Awarded a Mendenhall Postdoctoral Fellowship from USGS, he studied not only soil formation but also how soils store carbon, a topic that has become more important in light of climate change.

Soil is literally the foundation of ecosystems, Dr. Lawrence points out. It supports agricultural productivity, stores water and supplies a world of nutrients to filter pollution. What’s more, there’s roughly three times the amount of carbon in soil as in the atmosphere. So knowing how soils cycle carbon is key to understanding how ecosystems will respond to climate change. Soils could either accelerate the rate of greenhouse gas emissions or slow it down by taking up more carbon.

Carbon knowledge

At RMBL, Dr. Lawrence is coming up with a way to map the variability of soil carbon storage across the landscape. The USGS has plenty of maps on landscape characteristics like elevation and topography, slope and aspect, and height above the stream channel. And there are maps of geology and soil types. Dr. Lawrence plans to merge a map of soil carbon storage with existing geospatial maps. Ultimately, the goal is to build predictive models and make better projections for how soils will respond to change.

All soils do not store carbon equally. Not surprisingly, the researchers have seen that high amounts of carbon are found in wetlands and alpine fens (peat-forming wetlands). These carbon hotspots are also areas of diverse biogeochemistry and thus important for wildlife. We can only conserve them if we know where they are.

The lay of the land

Dr. Lawrence’s research team has four sites at Gothic to monitor four types of soils: one in an aspen stand, one in a lower elevation meadow, one in a higher elevation meadow, and one in a fen location. All have a solar-powered camera and temperature gage mounted on a tripod. They resemble atmospheric monitoring stations, but they’re measuring snow depth and soil temperature and moisture.

There’s an antenna mounted near the summit of Gothic Mountain, and the soil monitoring equipment sends radio signals to the antenna, which relays the information to another antenna at the Gothic Research Center. The measurements are recorded every hour, all year long.

Soon there will be nearly eight years of soil temperature and moisture measurements, and the team will release these data for other scientists to use. The long-term goal is to map soil carbon storage for the whole upper Colorado River Basin. The predictive model built using the data could help land managers weigh different strategies for increasing soil carbon storage or understand how a particular land use change might impact carbon storage. As the work is scaled up, the research could help support policy decisions as well.

RMBL scientists, too, could find some of the information useful for studies of pollinators, plant phenology, mammals, or virtually any part of the ecosystem.

It wouldn’t be the first time that RMBL research becomes knowledge that influences scientific thinking across the East River Valley. Or around the globe.

Corey Lawrence 

Corey Lawrence grew up on dairy farm in central New York and attended Clarkson University, graduating with degrees in Biology and Environmental Studies. He became interested in biogeochemistry while working at the Ecosystem Center of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. Corey received his PhD in Geosciences from University of Colorado in Boulder, studying the influence of Aeolian dust deposition on soil chemistry in the San Juan Mountains near Silverton, CO. For the past 15 years, Corey has worked as a Research Geologist for the United States Geological Survey. His research addresses the role of soils in the global carbon cycle.