Craig Rasmussen

Biography

Many of the active research projects in the Environmental Pedology laboratory are collaborative in nature and integrate related, but traditionally separate fields of study such as pedology, microbiology, geomorphology, soil physics, and climatology. One example of such research is a NSF sponsored project (DEB#0543130) examining how variation in soil parent material and the soil mineral assemblage control the stabilization and sequestration of organic carbon in temperate conifer forests. In particular, this project is focused on the role of aluminum as a stabilizing agent via its effects on the soil microbial community, organo-metal complexation, organo-mineral interaction, and soil carbon mean residence time. This project bridges soil chemistry, pedology, and soil microbiology and includes collaborators from the SWES Dept. and Northern Arizona University. We also have an active project sponsored by the Army Research Office investigating the linkage among environmental energy and mass transfer, pedogenesis, and soil production and soil depth distribution across hillslopes in semiarid ecosystems. The project seeks to couple several theoretical and numerical models describing mineral weathering and sediment transport with high resolution terrain and elevation data from LiDAR imaging to quantitatively predict soil development, physical and chemical weathering, and hillslope diffusivity at pedon to watershed scales. We also maintain active research collaboration with USDA Natural Resources Conversation Service soil scientists investigating the potential for improving soil survey process and data using digital geographic datasets such as remote sensing, digital elevation models, and geologic data. The current project “Predictive Soil Mapping in Southern Arizona” in particular is a close collaboration and cooperative agreement with the NRCS to provide a predictive soil “pre-map” for a large unmapped area of southern Arizona. We will also be exploring the use of this pre-map to determine a statistically robust sampling design that will enable high resolution spatial interpolation of soil physical and chemical properties. For the past several years a group of researchers at the University of Arizona have been working closely with a local land owner to better understand and predict the aboveground productivity response of semiarid rangeland to climate variability and climate change. This project couples pedologic data, a physically based numerical model of soil-water dynamics, meterological data and remote sensing time series to quantify how soils modulate the response of these systems to climate forcing.

Research Interest

environmental energy