Sabine Grunwald

Research Interests

Soil-Landscape Modeling (Pedometrics)
Quantitative Assessment of Environmental Quality (Environmetrics)
Research Briefs
Research Bits

Soil-Landscape Modeling (Pedometrics)

Soil-landscapes are complex and diverse due to pedo-geomorphological and hydrological processes acting over hundreds and thousands of years. These soil-forming and -destroying processes proceed simultaneously in soils and the resulting profile reflects the balance of these processes - present and past. The ecosystem services provided by multi-functional and multi-use watersheds are affected by the type, intensity and spatial arrangement of land use as well as underlying environmental landscape properties.

Characteristics of soil-landscapes:

They are three-dimensional systems
Soil and landscape attributes are distributed continuously in geographic space
Soil and landscape attributes are dynamic (i.e., they change over time)
Soil properties are interrelated with other environmental landscape properties

Soil-landscape models describe the spatial and temporal distribution of soil and landscape patterns at landscape scales.

The goal of soil-landscape modeling is to gain an understanding of the spatial distribution of soil attributes, characteristics of soils and their behavior through time.

Geographic information systems, global positioning systems, soil and remote sensors along with statistical and geostatistical methods are used to model soil-landscapes.

Quantitative Assessment of Environmental Quality (Environmetrics)

Environmental problems are diverse and range from loss in biodiversity, invasive species, fragmentation of habitats, contamination, non-point source pollution, degradation of soil and water quality, global climate warming, loss in key ecological processes, and decoupling of biogeochemical cycles to name only a few. Environmetrics uses quantitative spatially-explicit models to assess environmental quality. Multiple model types (stochastic, deterministic or mixed) are useful to quantify the spatial distribution of environmental properties and their spatial covariation with other landscape properties. The assessment of spatially-explicit relationships between environmental properties and their evolution through time will facilitate to improve our understanding of diverse environmental issues.

Specific research interests:

Quantify the spatial distribution of environmental properties
Assess geospatial relationships between environmental properties
Transfer results from controlled biogeochemical experiments and site-specific observations into landscapes that are characterized by complex, interrelated landscape properties
Understand functional relationships between landscape properties and ecosystem processes
Link key landscape indicators to ecosystem processes at micro, meso, and macro spatial scales that have slow, medium and fast response times
Investigate soil-water relationships

Tools and Methods used:

Geographic information systems (GIS)
Remote sensing
Soil sensors (e.g. visible/near-infrared diffuse reflectance spectroscopy)
Geostatistics (e.g. variogram analysis, ordinary kriging, cokriging, regression kriging, spatial stochastic simulation)
Statistics (e.g. Classification and Regression Trees, multivariate regression, Generalized Linear Models, neural networks)

Research Briefs

Spatial Distribution of Soil Properties in WCA3, Greater Everglade (2006)

Soil Landscape Modeling (2001)

GIS Meets Soil and Water Science (2001)

Research Bits

Rapid Assessment and Trajectory Modeling of Changes in Soil Carbon across a Southeastern Landscape (Florida) (2007)

Recent Changes in Soil Total Phosphorus in the Everglades: Water Conservation Area 3 (2007)

Assessment of the Spatial Distribution of Soil Phosphorus in a Northern Everglades Marsh (2006)

Spatial Patterns of Labile Forms of Phosphorus in a Subtropical Wetland (2006)

Incorporation of Auxiliary Information in the Geostatistical Simulation of Soil Nitrate-Nitrogen (2006)