Transport of Terrestrial Organic Carbon
Dr. Angela Dickens, a Postdoctoral Scholar who received her PhD from the Department of Chemistry, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, is working to understand how different forms of organic carbon (OC) move through and are transformed within the environment. Her postdoctoral research focuses on using radiocarbon measurements to constrain the timescales over which terrestrial vascular plant-derived OC is transported via river systems to the oceans. These terrestrial “residence times” are likely to vary depending on the properties of the watershed (e.g. size, relief, and climate) and, in particular, on the importance of storage of OC within the watershed (e.g. in soils or floodplains). An understanding of these residence times is fundamental to our comprehension of the dynamics of carbon cycling, however, our current understanding of these timescales remains extremely limited.