Raymond Lee

University of Wisconsin–Superior | UWS · Natural Sciences

The Earth and life sciences are replete with portmanteau (blended) words and neologisms. Researchers at the interfaces between the traditional disciplines within the Earth and life sciences have coined dual titles for ‘new’ disciplines, such as geobiology/biogeology and ecohydrology/hydroecology. An upsurge in such coinage over the last few decades...

The original meaning of the Critical Zone (CZ) was spatial and pointed to one physical referent: the terrestrial surface of the entire Earth. As usage increased among researchers in the geosciences, social sciences, and humanities, new meanings led to the concept pointing to different places and ideas. Emerging trends have expanded the CZ further:...

The concepts of resistance, recovery, and resilience are in diverse fields from behavioral psychology to planetary ecology. These “three Rs” describe some of the most important properties allowing complex systems to survive in dynamic environments. However, in many fields—including ecology—our ability to predict resistance, recovery and resilience...

In Arctic catchments, bacterioplankton are dispersed through soils and streams, both of which freeze and thaw/flow in phase, seasonally. To characterize this dispersal and its potential impact on biogeochemistry, we collected bacterioplankton and measured stream physicochemistry during snowmelt and after vegetation senescence across multiple stream...

Climate change is an existential threat to the vast global permafrost domain. The diverse human cultures, ecological communities, and biogeochemical cycles of this tenth of the planet depend on the persistence of frozen conditions. The complexity, immensity, and remoteness of permafrost ecosystems make it difficult to grasp how quickly things are c...

Human modification of water and nutrient flows has resulted in widespread degradation of aquatic ecosystems. The resulting global water crisis causes millions of deaths and trillions of USD in economic damages annually. Semiarid regions have been disproportionately affected because of high relative water demand and pollution. Many proven water mana...

Watersheds play a critical role in supplying water resources needed for human use and ecosystem health. Understanding and predicting how, when, and where changes in the quantity and quality of water resources occur under different environmental stresses including extreme events is crucial for sustainable management of water resources under a changi...

Subsurface flow dominates water movement from hillslopes to streams in most forested headwater catchments. Hewlett and Hibbert (1963, https://doi.org/10.1029/JZ068i004p01081) constructed an idealized hillslope model (0.91 × 0.91 × 15.0 m; 21.8°) using reconstituted C horizon soil to investigate importance of interflow, a type of subsurface flow. Th...

We quantified effects of future climate warming on temperature and stability in a variably stratified, hypereutrophic reservoir with large fluctuations in water level by calibrating a 2-D model (CE-QUAL-W2, version 3.7.1, Portland State University, Portland, USA) of reservoir hydrodynamics using a time series (1992 to 2011) of inflow and air and wa...

Isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in water from streams, snow, and lakes were used to model the ratio of evaporation to total inflow (E/I) of four high elevation lakes in closed basins in the Indian Himalaya. Air temperature and relative humidity (h) data from meteorological stations and global climate grids (GMAO-MERRA) were used as input to the mod...

Reservoir water quality can be compromised by algal production and anoxia, which in turn are impacted by hydrodynamic stability and water temperature. We developed a conceptual model to quantify the dominant controls on stability, anoxia, and transparency using statistical analysis of a long-term (1990–2011) data set for four reservoirs in San Dieg...