A team at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) studies ecosystem changes in a research area along the East River catchment near the Upper Colorado River headwaters. The team’s studies, part of the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (SFA) program, are useful for predicting how disturbances to mountainous watersheds impact the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon, and metals.

At the East River watershed research site, scientific teams led by Berkeley Lab and supported by the Department of Energy are using distributed and networked sensors, to explore how abrupt changes in hydrology from droughts and early snowmelt influence ecozones control over watershed exports.

At the East River field site’s mountainous headwater catchment in Colorado, teams of scientists led by Berkeley Lab and supported by the Department of Energy are working to identify major sources of watershed nitrogen inputs and its fate within the environment. Their goal is to use this pristine ‘natural laboratory’ to understand where, when, and how Nitrogen enters the system and how it is exported during river, soil, plant, and bedrock processes.