EES Seminar: COMPASS-FME: Understanding Coastal Systems in Transition, Vanessa Bailey, PNNL

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Coastal Observations, Mechanisms, and Predictions Across Systems and Scales – Field, Measurements, and Experiments (COMPASS-FME) is a multi-institutional project to understand coastal terrestrial-aquatic interfaces (TAI) and inform their representation in multiscale, hierarchical models. COMPASS-FME aims to improve the reliability and predictive power of ESMs by combining advanced computation with focused observational data to represent the complexity of coastal systems more accurately. This project investigates how the frequency and duration of flood events affect terrestrial-aquatic interface (TAI) ecosystems and how the consequences of these events propagate through water, sediments, soils, microbes, and plants to cause ecosystem state changes in at both saltwater and freshwater TAIs. Several data syntheses and model analyses have informed site selection, experimental designs, and sampling priorities. An array of sites, community collaborations, and manipulative experiments in the Chesapeake Bay and Lake Erie regions are used to reveal how ecosystem controls on these complex processes emerge along differing gradients in topography, soil saturation, ionic strength, redox state, and nutrient availability. These measurements are designed to support model couplings that link biogeochemistry, microbial processes, and hydrology with land models.

Dr Bailey currently leads the multi-institutional research program, “Coastal Observations, Mechanisms, and Predictions Across Systems and Scales – Field, Measurements, and Experiments” (COMPASS-FME) for the US Department of Energy and she is the Group Leader for the Structure, Function, and Design Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Dr. Bailey is an authority in soil microbial carbon cycling, and has experience in lab and field studies of how soil physics governs microbial function. Dr. Bailey was born, raised, and educated on the Canadian prairies; she received her B.S.A. from the University of Manitoba (1994) and her Ph.D. from the University of Alberta (1999). She joined PNNL as a post-doc in 2000. She has a joint appointment with the University of Toledo.