Supplementary material to “The Hills Are Alive: Earth Science in a Controlled Environment”
Published 7 April 2009
Travis Huxman, Peter Troch, Jon Chorover, David D. Breshears, Scott Saleska, Jon Pelletier, Xubin Zeng, and Javier Espeleta, Biosphere 2 Earth Science, University of Arizona, Tucson
Citation:
Huxman, T., P. Troch, J. Chorover, D. D. Breshears, S. Saleska, J. Pelletier, X. Zeng, and J. Espeleta (2009), The hills are alive: Earth science in a controlled environment, Eos Trans. AGU, 90(14), 120. [Full Article (pdf)]
Figure S1. The schematic for the institutional experiment. This experiment will require the renovation of the three former Intensive Forestry Biome (IFB) bays to the form of complex hillslopes taking the shape of a zero-order catchment. The mass balance of such a shape will significantly advance our understanding of the controls over landscape water balance. The experiment will have several phases: in phase I (illustrated in brown), the hillslopes will primarily be used to understand how geochemical processes in soils impact water flowpaths and soil network development. In phase II (illustrated in light green), the introduction of plant life (primarily model organisms) will allow for the evaluation of the partitioning of hydrological flowpaths with living systems impacting soil network development and the spatial pattern of transpiration within the bays. Phases I and II allow for significant replication, pose challenges with interpreting the time-course evolution of the systems, and provide pathways for refining modeling tools. Phase III (dark green) represents a biological perturbation, where deeply rooted vegetation (as compared to the initial community composition) will be placed within the bays, followed by Phase IV (green, yellow and red), where initially we intend to modify the seasonal distribution of precipitation. It should be noted that this formulation will result in a highly adaptive experiment that could be modified to a number of different questions.
