Critical Zone Observatories and the Site Seeker

The Critical Zone encompasses the terrestrial Earth extending from the top of the vegetation canopy down to and including the zone of freely circulating groundwater. Critical Zone Observatories (CZO) are environmental laboratories established to study the chemical, physical and biological processes that shape this zone at Earth's surface. Little is known about how these processes are coupled, and at what temporal and spatial scales. CZO research seeks to understand these couplings through monitoring and modeling at the watershed scale. The National CZO Program is a community resource that serves the international scientific community through research, infrastructure, data, and models.

Site Seeker is an interactive search tool for locating field sites used for Critical Zone research and is available at http://www.czen.org/sites/site_seeker. Study site characteristics have been organized using simple search terms including types of bedrock, soil, ecosystem and land use, as well mean annual precipitation and temperature, and the name of the network in which the site is administered. The development team has posted information pages for each of the sites within the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, and in some cases has gathered site-specific characteristics from on-line resources or the literature for LTER sites. We seek your input for the LTER sites – to gather more and more accurate information. Our goal for Site Seeker is to provide a tool for the greater scientific community that helps to facilitate collaboration and cooperation by allowing rapid identification of sites with characteristics that may be of interest to researchers around the world – to promote site specific and cross-site science and collaboration.