Avoiding Pollution Swapping while Reducing Agricultural Runoff of Nitrogen to the Chesapeake Bay
Faculty, staff, and students from the Appalachian Laboratory, the Horn Point Laboratory, and Washington College and a local farmer were featured on a Maryland Public Television segment on Maryland Farm and Harvest, describing their on-farm research on the Delmarva Peninsula. Their research shows that the water level Read More ...
Merging a mechanistic enzymatic model of soil heterotrophic respiration into an ecosystem model
Predictions of how the Earth will respond to climate change, including positive feedbacks caused by accelerated rates of decomposition of soil organic matter, are based in large part on projections of Earth system models (ESMs). However, one of the biggest Read More ...
Global N2O Budget Synthesis
Important new synthesis papers have come forth in 2019 and 2020 on the human impacts of the global nitrous oxide (N2O) budget. Most of us know nitrous oxide as “laughing gas,” used for its anesthetic effects. But nitrous oxide (N2O) Read More ...
Integrated Belowground Greenhouse Gas Flux Measurements and Modeling
Our main objective is to improve understanding of and modeling capacity for interactions of belowground temperature, moisture, and substrate supply that controls the net soil emissions of the three most important anthropogenic GHGs: CO2, CH4, and N2O. We have developed a novel integration of measurement and Read More ...
Long-term Carbon Studies at the Harvard and Howland Forests of New England
A seminal publication in Ecological Monographs (Finzi et al. 90(4), 2020, e01423) on long-term studies of carbon cycling at the Harvard Forest of western Massachusetts presents a comprehensive carbon budget and evidence that this 80-120 year old hardwood forest is gaining carbon Read More ...
Reactive Nitrogen in the Biosphere
The figure above is from Zhang et al., 2021, Nature Food (see below). The Research Coordination Network (RCN) on reactive nitrogen (Nr) sponsored seven workshops on topics including climate-nitrogen interactions, the human health impacts of excess nitrogen in air and water, Read More ...
Dr. Davidson and his team’s research in biogeochemistry includes the exchange of plant nutrients from the land to streams and groundwater and the exchange of greenhouse gases between the soil and the atmosphere.
Areas of expertise include:
- Biogeochemical effects of land-use change and land management
- The global nitrogen cycle, including the global nitrous oxide budget
- Soil microbial processes of nutrient cycling and greenhouse gas fluxes
- Leaching of plant nutrients to streams and groundwater
- Interdisciplinary studies of nitrogen management in agriculture
- Interactions of C, N, P, and other nutrient cycles in terrestrial ecosystems
- Land-water-atmosphere exchanges of greenhouse gases and nutrients
- Temperature sensitivity of soil organic matter decomposition
- Modeling soil microbial processes