James Bauer

My group's research focuses on the cycling of carbon and associated elements (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus, etc.) in watershed, river, estuarine and marine environments. Our primary goals are to 1) gain a better understanding of the production, transport and degradation of organic materials in relation to the overall C, N and P cycles in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments, 2) investigate the dynamics of, and interactions between, carbon and nutrient cycling that occur at the interface between land and aquatic systems, and 3) evaluate the roles of allochthonous and autochthonous materials in aquatic ecosystems. Our current research focuses on the sources and ages of carbon and organic matter utilized by and supporting secondary production in lower microbial, planktonic, and sedimentary food webs. This is presently a topic of significant interest in the ecological, earth and environmental sciences because of how it links processes at the micro-scale with those at the global scale (for example, land-aquatic-atmospheric exchanges of CO2). In particular, the transport of carbon and organic materials from land via the hydrologic cycle, and its fates in rivers, estuaries and coastal waters is one of the most poorly constrained terms in the global carbon cycle. I received formal training in both microbial ecology and biogeochemistry, and as a result have an active and on-going interest in addressing questions of an interdisciplinary nature across a variety of aquatic environments. We utilize a broad array of biogeochemical, microbial and other analytical tools in our research which permits new insights to these processes beyond those afforded by traditional techniques. In addition, my training in the use and application of advanced analytical chemical techniques also allows our group to employee a number of state-of-the-art methods and analytical approaches in our research that have yielded unique results and insights into aquatic processes and elemental cycles. These include Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), Stable Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS), Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS), Electrospray Fourier Transform Inductively Coupled Mass Spectrometry (ES-FTICR-MS), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, among others.