Studying wildfire effects on ecosystems is difficult because predicting *where* and *when* something will burn is nearly impossible, and rarely do you have robust pre-fire data. My dissertation samples from the Great Smoky Mountain National Park were collected prior to the Chimney Tops 2 from 2016. It was a wind-driven high intensity and high severity fire that burned 4,500 hectares. In this paper, we examine the pre and post fire pyrogenic carbon signal using an innovative BPCA method developed by Dr. Matosziuk.
The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) integrates hard infrastructure along with cloud-based data products that are publicly available. In this paper we advertised just *some* of the capabilities that NEON currently has, and describe how other site-specific instruments/observations may be incorporated.
Finding carbon in soils is easy, tracing where it came from is hard and tracing that carbon *down* the soil profile is even harder. Here I presented some of my dissertation work where we examine plant derived carbon compounds across the NEON sites, and down soil profiles often reaching 1-meter or more in depth.
Spodosols are the **most** photogenic soils *(personal opinion)*. Their dark organic surface horizons, followed by a light colored mineral horizon, then bookend-ed with another very dark - often red - mineral horizon makes these tri-colored soils magnificent to stare at. These Spodosols are relatively rare, but concentrated in a few places in the US where historical anthropogenic emissions are the most likely sources of Mercury. In this paper we focus on different Spodosols around the US, combining pedologic and geochemical analysis to identify how carbon and mercury interact down the soil profile.
There's a lot of interest around fires effects on soil. What's less often discussed is how well the soil records fire by the presense of Pyrogenic Carbon (PyC). We used the NEON sites and quantified how much PyC was present, and its relative quality, down soil profiles often reaching 1-meter in depth. Turns out, fire *was* everywhere.