About me

I am a Research Ecologist (Postdoctoral Research Associate) at the USDA-ARS Jornada Expermimental Range in Las Cruces, NM.

The primary focus of my research is to understand how soil properties and processes change in response to anthropogenic impacts, in particular land-use and climate change. My research employs a basic and applied approach to pedology that centers on anthropogenic impacts and quantifies and predicts patterns and processes of human-affected soil change. In particular, my research focuses on dynamic soil properties (i.e., soil organic matter, metals and nutrients) and the pedogenic controls that direct their spatial distribution, temporal dynamics and biogeochemical cycling. Intrinsic to this quantification of soil change is the need to link these effects across multiple spatial and temporal scales. My research examines the spatial distribution and variability of soil properties and processes from the microscopic to landscape scale, and how our understanding of soil processes at small spatial scales (i.e., µm-mm) may be upscaled to the pedon-to-landscape scale.

Growing anthropogenic pressures (e.g., urbanization, environmental pollution, climate change) have radically altered the structure and function of many ecosystems and the resulting services they provide. As a result, there is a growing need to quantify and understand the biophysical properties of landscapes from a local- to regional- to national-scale, to promote sustainable resource management. Soils play a fundamental role in transmitting, storing, and reacting with natural and human-introduced materials and thus exert a dominant control on the hydrologic and geochemical processes which drive ecosystem function.

My interest in anthropogenic impacts on soil ecosystem processes began with seasonal wetlands. Seasonal wetlands are unique in that they exhibit disproportionately high rates of biogeochemical cycling due to their changing redox state and high proportion of interfacial zones where redox cycling is most intense. In this research I examined a range of topics from the effects of sedimentation on C cycling in seasonally saturated wetland soils, to the effects of iron and sulfate reduction on P mobilization. I have conducted several spatially-explicit wetland studies, examining the effects of agricultural runoff on soil biogeochemical processes within different wetland environments using point sampling, remote sensing, and geostatistics.