Welcome to the CZO All Hands Meeting web site!

Meeting Goals:

- to bring together CZO researchers and others from the broader community working on critical zone processes to discuss progress in our understanding of what controls the structure, functioning and evolution of the critical zone, and to start the process of synthesis of this knowledge across national and international CZOs.

Meeting Theme:

-to focus on outlining the requirements for elucidating a unifying theory and techniques that can explain the observed structure and function of the critical zone across environmental gradients, and that can help predict the evolution of the critical zone in a changing environment.

- Even though such unifying theory may be well beyond our reach at this stage of the program, the theme is appropriate for developing an efficient and common language across CZO researchers as well as to initiate the process of synthesis.

Meeting Structure:

- There will be four half-day meeting sessions, each focusing strongly on investigator interactions:

(i) Ecosystem Exchange and Hydrologic Partitioning,
(ii) Subsurface Biogeochemistry,
(iii) Ground and Surface Water Dynamics, and
(iv) Critical Zone Evolution.
- The focus in the sessions on processes rather than drivers of the critical zone (geology, climate, time) provides a framework that is common across the CZOs, and is sufficiently broad to stimulate discussions between scientists with different backgrounds.

- Each session will be introduced by the session convener and a key-note lecture (25 min + 10 min discussion). This will then be followed by three shorter (10 min + 5 min discussion) research oral presentations by CZO investigators (preferably students, postdocs, and Assistant Professors), and then brief (2 min – 1 slide) invitations to the posters submitted to that specific session (12-16 per session, 30 min total). Please submit abstracts by April 1st (5 pm Pacific time). Due to the limited number of oral slots, please don't request an oral slot unless your work is some way transformative or unifying to the larger theme of CZO science.

- There will be an hour-long poster session/coffee break followed by

- Session summary and discussion (30 min)

- Additionally, there will be a one-day field trip (Tue) into the Santa Catalina Mountains CZO and a one-day focused discussion on cross-CZO initiatives (Thur).