Benjamin Sulman. Image credit: Carlos Jones, ORNL
Estuarine wetlands — ecosystems where land meets rivers and oceans — host a complex, ever-shifting array of biogeochemical processes that affect the storage and processing of nitrogen and carbon in the soil and their release to the environment.
Benjamin Sulman, a scientist in ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division, seeks to fully assess this multidimensional system by simulating the environment using the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, a DOE leading-edge modeling, simulation and prediction project involving eight national labs, including ORNL.
Sulman credits exposure to a wide range of scientific fields and a cadre of mentors during his academic career for preparing him to tackle the complexity of modeling wetland ecosystems.
“The fact that I'm able to work in this area of ecology is due to learning from a lot of really talented people,” he said. “I've built a basic skill set in developing environmental models, and now I can pivot those tools to work with different people and on different kinds of problems. Learning something new all the time makes research really exciting and enjoyable.”
During his undergraduate program in physics and astronomy at Oberlin College in Ohio, Sulman began learning data analysis and computer coding. Shifting toward applied physics during his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he began exploring atmospheric and oceanic sciences, specifically interactions between ecosystems in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide exchange and how ecosystems affect turbulence and movement of air. His doctoral work, completed in 2012 at UW Madison, examined how wetland ecosystems exchange carbon dioxide with the atmosphere and how atmospheric changes affect wetlands.
Next, Sulman held postdoc appointments at Princeton University and Indiana University, where his work focused on environmental carbon cycle modeling with a focus on soils. He joined ORNL two years ago, where he has conducted ecosystem modeling of Arctic tundra plants and soil carbon processes.
“Arctic tundra processes and coastal wetland processes have some things in common: They’re not well represented in models, and they both have many complex chemical processes at play,” Sulman said. “Wetlands are dynamic; they are the intersection of all these different processes — dry soil, underwater soil, the chemical makeup of fresh water and salt water, vegetation. They’re all interacting with each other.”
Sulman’s aim by the end of his five-year early-career project is to merge coastal data from the continental United States into one model that tracks how water flows from inland to the coasts as it goes through wetlands and how that influences the ocean near the United States. Having a comprehensive model can help make sense of how sudden changes, like hurricanes and wildfires, affect the nation’s wetlands and oceans.
“It’s increasingly important to understand how these ecosystems work,” Sulman said. “Catastrophic events in an ecosystem are missing from a lot of current models.”
