Pamela Sullivan

My research program focuses on developing an understanding of how terrestrial water storage and water quality are influenced by climate, land cover, and land use. Changing climate and current land and water use practices threaten water availability (quantity and quality) for human populations. My goal is to project Earth’s near surface fluxes (e.g., water, solutes, and sediments) and architecture (e.g., soil thickness and hydrologic properties) — a process termed earthcasting — to examine how human and climatic perturbations will drive the evolution of terrestrial Earth. To accomplish this goal, my lab examines the interactions among vegetation, soil, and water across climatic gradients in varying spatial (mm to km) and temporal (seconds to millennia) scales; making targeted observations of chemical, physical, and biological variables to support process understanding and the development of predictive models. Specifically, we characterize and quantify how hydraulic properties and plant-soil-water-atmosphere interactions respond to changing climate, and how these processes vary with geology and plant community composition.