July 16, 2008, Penn State

www.czen.org

Goldschmidt Meeting, Vancouver

Introduction and CZEN Overview

The Critical Zone = the zone extending from the outer vegetation envelope to

the lower limit of groundwater

Anderson et al., 2004

Human population through historical time . . .

Slide from Mike Hochella, Univ of Delaware meeting

Slide from Mike Hochella, Univ of Delaware meeting

From Hooke, R. LeB., 2000, Geology, Vol. 28, No. 9.Historical Rates of Earth MovedHistorical Rates of Earth Moved

geologic rate

~2 timesgeologic

rate

"the bottom line is, we move about 10 times as much

sediment as all natural processes put together," –Bruce Wilkinson, U. Michigan, Nov. 2004, GSA Meeting

Slide from Mike Hochella, Univ of Delaware meeting

Nutrients

Chemistryof Water

AtmosphereLandform Evolution

What processes control fluxes of carbon, particulates, and reactive gases over different timescales?

How do biogeochemical processes govern long-term sustainability of water and soil resources?

How do processes that nourish ecosystems change over human and geologic time scales?

How do variations in and perturbation to chemical and physical weathering processes impact the Critical Zone?

The Four Driving Questions

To answer these questions requires scientists who can cross disciplines and also think across timescales that vary from seconds to tens of millions of years

How can we quantitatively predict (earthcast) the response of the earth

surface to natural and human perturbation? To do this, we need…

• new techniques to measure the controlling variables at the relevant scales of time and space

• comprehensive, long-term, and systematic observations of the key variables needed to earthcast

• measurement of the thermodynamic and kinetic data necessary to predict the fluxes of matter and energy occurring at interfaces between reservoirs with very different dynamics

• development of conceptual models• development of a complete set of governing equations for surface

processes• improvements in modeling of dynamical complexities and emergent

phenomena

Fundamental Critical Zone

Science

USDA

EPANASA

DOE

NSF

EAR BIO

The U.S. funding perspective

• Workshop with 20 participants (Baltimore, October 2003)• WSSC website (http://www.wssc.psu.edu/) • Open meeting at AGU (Dec. 2003) • Anderson et al. (2004) published in EOS• Goldschmidt conf., Copenhagen, open meeting (2004)• Open meeting at WRI-11, Saratoga Springs (June 2004)• WSSC European science meeting (England, Oct. 2004)• WSSC UK scientists meeting (October 2004)• 2005 Goldschmidt conference: Earth’s Weathering

Engine• 2nd WSSC Workshop, January 2005, at NSF, WSSC

renamed as CZEN• Univ of Delaware Frontiers of Crit Zone meeting, 2006• Data and Date Structures Meeting at Penn State, 2007

Partial History: WSSC and CZEN

Workshop report from the Univ of Delaware meeting

Download from www.czen.org

Pick up a copy at the EarthChem-CZEN-ChemxSeer booth

The Tool that this Community Needs

• A network of observatories (Critical Zone Exploration Network, CZEN) that all Critical Zone scientists could work on together

• CZEN would be open for investigation using all chemical or physical or hydrological or ecological or molecular biological or geological (etc.) techniques

Climate

Topography

BiologyTime

Lithology

Critical Zone Exploration Network

Disturbance

Why a network?

• Network can explore one environmental variable while keeping other variables constant

• Network allows comparison of the same data measured in the same way at multiple sites

• Network allows understanding of broad patterns of behavior

• Network can create community among scientists and generate interdisciplinary understanding

Hawaii Critical Zone Network

Peter Vitousek and Oliver Chadwick have spearheaded both chronosequences and climosequences in Hawaii that have drawn many scientists to investigate the Hawaiian CZ

CZEN Seed Sites funded in 2006

NSF announced a competition for Critical Zone Observatories in 2006

($8m new money)• Largely in response to exciting new surface

Earth sciences• In partial response to the NRC BROES report

that highlighted the Critical Zone• In partial response to community pressure from

CUAHSI, WSSC, CZEN, NCED, many others• In partial response to proposal pressure Earth

surface scientists• Run jointly by Geomorphology, Geobiology and

Low T Geochemistry, and Hydrology programs

Critical Zone Observatories

• Sierra Nevada Transect (Roger Bales)

• Boulder Creek (Suzanne Anderson)

• Susquehanna Shale Hills (Chris Duffy)

SSHO: Shale Transect SSHO: Shale Transect

Chris DuffySue BrantleyRudy Slingerland David EissenstatKen DavisKaren SalvageKamni SinghaLaura ToranPat ReedEric KirbyTim WhiteKevin DresslerDoug MillerRay FletcherMichelle TuttlePaul BiermanPeter LichtnerCarl Steefel

SSHO Investigators Transect Investigators

CZEN International Sites

• BigLink, Switzerland

• Guadeloupe, France

• Strengbach, France

Criteria to become a CZEN site

• Data available for water and soils down to bedrock

• Willingness to share data

• Willingness to open the site to other investigators

• Interest in answering questions that can only be answered with a network of sites

For a given lithology, can we use the climate and the soil residence time or

exposure time to predict

• ….the thickness of regolith on the landscape?

• …the profiles of elements and minerals as a function of depth to bedrock?

What controls the depth and chemistry of the Earth’s regolith?

To answer such questions across a network requires shared data

• We have a great variety of data types that vary with space and time

• We need to have some measurements that are made at all sites = core data

• We will have some measurements that are more specialized and that will not be made at all sites = specialized data

CZEN has drafted an ontology that describes the structure of the data, and it has been posted for comments

http://www.czen.org/content/critical-zone-ontologyhttp://www.czen.org

Table 1. Minimum Information to be Submitted from CZEN SitesSite information (as available): Digital topography (and derived information

such as slope and curvature); Digital geology; Digital soil; Landform type; Landform position, Parent material type (e.g., alluvial, bedrock), Latitude,

Longitude, Description of drainage characteristics, Slope, Aspect, Land use description, Elevation, Geology.

Meteorological characteristics: Daily, monthly and mean annual temperature, precipitation, and potential evapotranspiration.

Regolith characterization: Bedrock chemistry and mineralogy; Soil and saprolite bulk density, Soil chemistry (as function of depth to bedrock), Soil mineralogy (as function of depth to bedrock), Loss on ignition (if applicable),

Soil profile description, Landform age or soil production rates, Depth to bedrock, Analysis company (if applicable for chemical analysis); Analysis

technique (for chemistry and mineralogy); Date of analysis; Sample preparation (size separation, drying, ashed or unashed); Grain size analyzed

Data Infrastructure for CZ Science

• The three CZOs must share data after a two year embargo period

• Only moderate funding was included in each CZO proposal to place data onto the web

• The SSHO CZO is discussing placing data onto the web using ChemxSeer, but ultimately storing it with EarthChem (CZ.db …with Kerstin Lehnert, Columbia U.)

• As the CZ data infrastructure for CZO grows, we should augment this CZO data with data from other sites and legacy data, as well as kinetic and thermodynamic data

Kinetic Data Synthesis by Center for Environmental Kinetics Analysis (CEKA)

Kaolinite

Valley Floor0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70-1 -0.5 0 0.5 1

Tau (Zr)

Depth

(cm

)

Published soil profile data

Datasets compiled and placed online (search for ChemxSeer): silicate mineral dissolution rate constants; chemistry of soils where available from surface to bedrock with exposure age

CEKA was funded by the National Science Foundation and Dept of Energy as an Environmental Molecular Sciences Institute

http://chemxseer.ist.psu.eduPI: Karl Mueller,

Funded by NSF

C. Lee Giles, Levent Bolelli, Xiaonan Lu, Ying Liu, Anuj Jaiswal, Kun Bai, Bingjun Sun, Isaac Councill, Prasenjit Mitra, James Z. Wang, Karl Mueller, James Kubicki, Barbara Garrison, Joel Bandstra, Qingzhao Tan, Juan Pablo Ramirez Fernandez

Chemistry, Geosciences, Information Sciences and TechnologyPennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Data Search Example in ChemXSeer

Search document content and metadata

Table Search Interface in ChemxSeer

Extracts the data from the table automatically for user decision-making

Searches tables with specific properties

ChemXSeer Data Extraction from Figures

Numerical data in scientific publications are often found in figures.

Tools that automate the data extraction from figures provide the following:• Increases our understanding of key concepts of papers• Eases the process of comparative analyses.• Enables regeneration of figures in different contexts.• Enables search for documents with figures containing specific experiment results.

X. Lu, et.al, JCDL 2006.

What kind of cyberinfrastructure might we want?

• Cyberinfrastructure that promotes use of datasets by domain scientists

• Cyberinfrastructure that promotes use of reactive transport models (eg Flotran, Crunch, Witch, Min3)

• Cyberinfrastructure that will invite domain scientists to share data and make it accessible

• Cyberinfrastructure that will facilitate both private and public datasets

• Cyberinfrastructure that is enabled by funding agencies, professional societies, publishing houses, and individual scientists

• Cyberinfrastructure that brings communities together, more predictive capability, and a stronger voice

How can a cyberinfrastructure be inviting to domain scientists?

• The site will be the “go to” place to make comparisons across data sets

• The site will make it easy for domain scientists to compare their data with other data

• The site will allow domain scientists to keep their own data private until released after an embargo period

• The site will make it easy for scientists to cite authors of the data

• The site will have rudimentary tools to work on visualizing or fitting data

• The site will make it easy for nonspecialists or scientists from other fields to find and use data (interoperability)

• The site will promote “discussion” between other portals or other cyberinfrastructures

Fundamental Critical Zone

Science

ChemxSeer(cybertools

for chemistry)

CZEN.org(social networking,data management)

EarthChem(databases)

CZEN(field sites)

CZEN is a network of

• Sites (network of field sites)

• Ideas (network of model development)

• Tools (network of tools tested on sites and cybertools for using data)

• People (network of international scientists and students)

www.czen.org

• Social networking site for Critical Zone scientists• Content management system• 566 registered users• Growing at a rate of about 4/day• 500 pages • 33 groups including international groups • 14 post types are available • Biggest problem: teaching geochemists how to

use a content management system!

•Claire Hoff, U. of New Hampshire, Calcium leaching dynamics, Hasselt University, Belgium•Heather Buss, USGS Postdoctoral Fellow, Guadeloupe and Puerto Rico. •Heidi Albrecht, Penn State U., Frasassi Cave, Italy.•Julie Pett-Ridge, Cornell U., Oxford U., UK•Mark Waldrop, USGS Postdoctoral Fellow, Lancaster U., England.•Sarah Hayes, U. of Arizona, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.•Simon Mudd, Vanderbilt U., Oxford U., UK•Susan Crow, Purdue U., Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland.•Susan Riggins, U. of Colorado-Boulder, British Geological Survey.

CZEN International Student Scholars—received NSF funding to work in Europe in 2006/07

Current ongoing competition for students to receive funded to attend the SoilCritZone meeting in Crete

in Sept 2008

Fundamental Critical Zone

Science

USDA

EPANASA

DOE

NSF

EAR BIO

The U.S. funding perspective

If CZ scientists build the science…the funding will come

The problem is not just crossing disciplines but also crossing timescales from seconds to millenia…earth scientists must continue to

emphasize the time component so that we can earthcast the surface earth system

Anderson et al., 2004