MPS

Much unsaturated-zone water moves not as typically slow diffuse flow, but rapidly through preferential flow channels such as root holes and fractures. Impacts are profound and far-reaching for issues such as contaminant transport, ecohydrology, and aquifer recharge. Understanding is limited and accepted theory is lacking, making preferential flow a crucial and exciting area of earth science.

An opportunity to work with models of multivariate environmental and ecological processes from either a mathematical/statistical or scientific focus. The former would focus on elaborating current methods for making inferences or predictions from multivariate data while the latter would focus on using those current methods to better understand multivariate environmental or ecological processes.

In an unprecedented large-scale mortality event, Florida has lost >90% of many coral species. This event is unusual due to its expansive spatial extent, the number of affected species (at least 21 scleractinian coral species), and severity of losses (> 95% for Dendrogyra cylindrus), effectively eliminating some species from the tract.

Work with USGS scientists to apply high performance computing principles and techniques to solve national and international earth science challenges.