Welcome to the Watershed-Ecosystem Research Laboratory (WERL) of the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Our group is committed to untangling the intricate interactions between natural and human drivers and the ecosystem in a fast-changing world. In this endeavor, we integrate data (remote sensing, ground-based data, and databases) and fundamental principles into data- and computationally-intensive models to understand complex watershed-ecosystem dynamics in intensively managed landscapes.

Our research encompasses:

• Contaminant fate and transport processes (sediment, nutrients, and pesticides) in intensively managed landscapes
• Development and integration of models, algorithms, and systems for analysis of ecosystem responses including changes in climate and land-use.
• Evaluation of model performance using global uncertainty, sensitivity analysis, and pattern identification
• Soil and water interactions on large scales from local perspectives
• Hydrologic time series analysis