Figure 1: Map of ER site and measurements of the SFA and some
collaborators. The yellow line indicates the East River Community
Observatory domain. The red lines indicate the major drainage boundaries
of the East River, Washington Gulch (Wash. Gul.), Slate River, and Coal
Creek. The blue lines show stream flow lines determined from the
National Hydrography Dataset
(U.S. Geological Survey,
2001). Measurements by community partners in the Slate River and
Redwell basin are not shown. The white box shows the intensively sampled
Pumphouse subregion, which include measurements along a hillslope
transect and and the meandering floodplain of the East River.
East River Measurements, field and data management
infrastructure
The SFA and collaborators have collected sample- and sensor-based
measurements at several locations across the East River and adjacent
drainages (Figure 1). Regions of particular emphasis include
“SFA-intensive” sites located within representative meanders and a
hillslope in a lower montane subregion (labeled ‘Pumphouse’) of the
pristine East River drainage basin, where several cross-disciplinary,
co-located measurements are being conducted. Additional “satellite”
sites, targeting specific research questions are located near the Brush
Creek confluence floodplain, an elevation gradient of research meadows
along Washington Gulch and on the flanks of Cinnamon Mountain and Mount
Baldy, Snodgrass Mountain, and mining-impacted sites in both Coal Creek
and the Redwell Basin.
The ER instrumentation network maintained by the SFA and collaborators
includes 15 stream-gaging and water quality stations used to obtain
paired concentration-discharge measurements, 6 weather stations with
soil moisture and temperature probes, 18 instrumented groundwater wells
(e.g Figure 2a-2c), and about ~40 piezometers,
~15 ecohydrological sensor stations, and
~40 digital phenocam locations (Varadharajan et al.
2020). An eddy flux tower is maintained in the East River floodplain by
the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Extensive
measurements of depth-resolved snow density, snow water equivalent,
whole snowpit and rain chemistry, and stable isotopes of snow, rain and
snowmelt water have been conducted over multiple years to inform stream
water sources (Fang et al.,
2019). Snowmelt manipulation experiments in vegetation plots in
different mountain life zones were used to study the impacts of snowmelt
timing on vegetation phenology. Metagenomic analyses of microbial
communities have been conducted for soils and sediments representing
various locations across the floodplain meanders and lower montane
hillslopes that contribute water and solutes to the river
(Lavy et al., 2020;
Matheus Carnevali et al., 2020; Sorensen et al., 2020), resulting in
over 5,000 metagenome-assembled genomes. In addition, several
multi-institutional remote sensing campaigns have been conducted at the
ER which include a 2015 Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) survey led
by the SFA (Wainwright &
Williams, 2017), Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) flights by the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Joint Propulsion
Laboratory (NASA JPL) in 2016, 2018 and 2019
(Painter et al., 2016), a
2017 USGS Airborne Electromagnetic survey, and a 2018 National
Ecological Observation Network (NEON) hyperspectral survey paired with
an extensive ground-based campaign conducted in coordination with
Stanford University (Chadwick
et al., 2020). In 2021, a two-year deployment of the DOE’s Atmospheric
Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program mobile Surface Atmosphere Integrated
Field Laboratory (SAIL) will use more than three dozen instruments to
collect a suite of meteorology, clouds, aerosol and other atmospheric
measurements in the ER
(http://sail.lbl.gov). The SFA’s ER
measurement locations are viewable through a public, user-friendly field
information portal
(https://wfsfa-data.lbl.gov/watershed/).