The Catalina-Jemez CZO infrastructure is comprised of people, models, a range of analytical tools, and a sensor/sampler array established in our field site.  Our people include faculty, staff and scientists working across the fields of earth and ecosystem sciences, conducting observational, experimental, and modeling research.  By maintaining consistent dialogue among observation, experiment, and modeling components, we seek to develop a progressively-evolved understanding of CZ processes. Our infrastructure has to include, therefore, the range of disciplinary tools and approaches that can contribute to unraveling the coupled physics, chemistry and biology leading to CZ change.

In respect to the sensor/sampler array, initial Catalina-Jemez CZO instrumentation efforts have focused on supporting our capacity to measure concurrently on a given tectonic template (i) climate-driven forcing and (ii) CZ response.  Specifically, we seek to measure in real-time and model-space quantitative relations among ecohydrologic partitioning (EHP), subsurface biogeochemistry (SSB), surface water dynamics (SWD), and landscape evolution (LSE).

A broader impact of our real-time and model-space landscape research is to help inform federal, state and local managers of public and private land.  In the southwestern US, management agencies, resource managers, and private land owners are facing new challenges arising from climate and disturbance-induced threshold changes in ecosystem structure (e.g., see Williams et al., 2012, Nature Climate Change).  Our CZO seeks to generate scientific data on the couplings among biological, chemical and physical CZ processes that can also provide a scientific foundation for land and water management decisions.  To do so, we combine a conceptual modeling framework with a hypothesis-driven multi-component CZO sensor/sampler array, and strategically executed measurement/sampling campaigns.