Dr. Stieglitz is an Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his BA in physics from Columbia College of Columbia University and shortly thereafter earned an MS in applied geophysics from the Henry Krumb School of Mines at Columbia University. After spending several years in industry, Dr Stieglitz earned a Ph.D. in hydrology at Columbia’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. He was as NOAA Global Change Post-doctoral Fellow at The Ecosystem Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory. From 1996 through 2003 Dr. Stieglitz was a Doherty Associate Research Scientist at Columbia’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. He joined the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003. His research interests lie at the interface between hydrology, snow and permafrost dynamics, geomorphology, biology, and biogeochemistry. In his high latitude work he explores how changes in the arctic hydrologic system will propagate through arctic ecosystems via changes in nutrient transport, N and C dynamics, and changes in species distributions.
I am an ecosystem scientist with broad interests in the responses and feedbacks of ecosystems to environmental change. Most of my current research takes place in the Arctic (field sites are in Russia, Canada, and Alaska), and addresses how climate change is impacting the cycles of water and chemicals in the environment. I have also studied desert streams in the southwestern United States, stream/riparian ecosystems in France, and estuaries in Massachusetts. I am strongly committed to integrating education and outreach into my research projects, and am particularly interested in exposing K-12 students to the excitement of scientific research.
Research in my laboratory focuses on the effects of human activity on water, carbon, and nutrient fluxes from land to sea; the responses of estuarine and coastal food webs to changes in land-derived resources; and the use of stable isotopes and other natural tracers to follow water and water-borne constituents across the land-sea interface. Environmental changes as a consequence of human activity have a profound influence on the transport of water and water-borne constituents from land to sea. In turn, changes in the fluxes of water, carbon, and nutrients to estuaries and the coastal ocean are altering fundamental ecosystem properties such as primary production and food web structure. Changes in land-sea fluxes have broader implications as well, including alteration of the global carbon budget and potential impacts of freshwater inputs on global ocean circulation and climate. To identify and explore changes in land-sea coupling I use a wide variety of approaches including analysis of historic data sets, field studies of biogeochemical cycling and constituent transport, and modeling. In my field studies, I frequently take advantage stable isotopes and other natural markers to track the fate of water, organic matter, and nutrients from land through estuarine and marine systems.
The theme of my research is the general topic of aquatic productivity. My approach to understanding aquatic productivity is through the study of the cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur at the process, ecosystem and global levels. Emphasis has been placed on the use of whole ecosystem experiments and on the use of stable isotope tracers. These research tools allow investigations to proceed at the scale of intact ecosystems. The goal is to develop an understanding of ecosystem behavior that is relevant to the management and prediction of ecosystem properties in the face of local and global change. My current research topics include long-term studies of Arctic streams on the North Slope of Alaska. Every summer since 1983, phosphorus has been added to the Kuparuk River, resulting in a different habitat for stream insects. This experiment is important because regional climatic warming is thawing permafrost soils that contain nutrients such as phosphorus. Another Arctic project involves the study of global hydrological and biogeochemical cycles in Eurasian rivers. I also study nitrogen cycling in headwater streams. Nitrogen enters streams as a result of the increase in agricultural use, fossil fuel combustion, and human population. In a cooperative study involving eight sites, we are investigating what happens to nitrogen once it enters the streams. Finally, my research also involves the study of sulfur, carbon, and nitrogen cycling in the estuaries of Plum Island Sound in northern Massachusetts.
