The Susquehanna Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory is a temperate, forested landscape and provides a multi-disciplinary framework for quantitative prediction of Critical Zone creation, structure and evolution by focusing on pathways and rates of water, solute and sediment flow.  Our focus questions, “How does water sculpt a landscape on shale bedrock”  and "what are the pathways and time scales of transport" have engaged investigations in soil biogeochemistry, hydrometeorology, hydropedology, geomorphology, ecology, geophysics, geochemistry and isotope hydrology.  Collectively, our team has identified primary flow pathways for energy, water and solutes and is working towards closing the water and the elemental budgets within the catchment. 

The team has also worked with our international CZO partners in the SoilTrEC project funded by the Eurpean Commision to build catchment flow models at 4 ritical Zone Observatories across Europe: 1) Koiliaris-White Mountains CZO in Crete, 2)  Lysina CZO, Czech Republic; 3) Plynlimon CZO, Wales, UK; 4) Damma Glacier, CZO, Switzerland. The team members are: Christopher Duffy, Nikos Nikolaidis, Pavel Kram, Stefano Bernasconi, Xuan Yu, Daniel Moraetis, Anna Lamacova, David Robinson, Evan Thomas, Maria Andrianaki, Florian Kobierska, Brian Reynolds, Tim White, Lele Shu.  The Lysina CZO catchment, a forested research catchment in northern Czech Republic, provides an interesting example of important outcomes relevant to society, and knowledge transfer through application of the Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Model developed at the Shale Hills CZO to an international CZO. The catchment model simulates how soil moisture, groundwater levels and streamflow respond to variations in weather and longer term seasonal climate change.

The research goal is to assess the impact of long term landuse changes from forest cutting practices, and to assess the impact of soil degradation on the water yield from the catchment. A major finding is that historical tree cutting practices do not seem to impact the seasonal runoff for either the springtime peak runoff or the summer time drought flows (low-flow). This implies that their historical management of selective tree cutting by small patches every 10 years is a sustainable landuse practice with minimal impact on catchment runoff.   Current work is using the catchment model to predict the impact of soil degradation and how soil structure (soil porosity) impacts streamflow. 

In conjunction with the State College Area School District, a STEM Academy was created to engage incoming first year high school students with high caliber academic experiences.  Through hands-on activities like measure and monitor soil moisture, collect GPS data, and install a weather station, pre-service and master level teachers along with the high school students learned how to compare the various types of data streaming from the catchment with data collected on their own school premises, thus engaging students in relevant, project-based collaborative research.  

Numerous data sets have been collected through sensor measurements and sampling campaigns throughout the funding cycle and are available to the public here:  http://criticalzone.org/shale-hills/data/.  To highlight the benefit of Critical Zone Observatory science, disciplinary research products such as the total tree survey 2008 (doi:10.1594/IEDA/100268), sap flow measurements, and soil moisture patterns have led to novel interdisciplinary findings such as how trees of different vascular anatomy respond to the same wetting and drying events. Lidar data is being used by non-CZO teams to evaluate the impact of climate change on wetlands in the Shaver Creek watershed. Historical hydro-climatic r...

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