CZEN Home

The Critical Zone Exploration Network (CZEN) is a community of people and a network of field sites investigating processes within the Critical Zone, defined as the Earth’s outer layer from vegetation canopy to the soil and groundwater that sustains human life. CZEN members are a diverse group of researchers and educators who study the physical, chemical and biological processes shaping and transforming Earth’s Critical Zone. This research spans a wide range of disciplines including geosciences, hydrology, microbiology, ecology, soil science, and engineering. CZEN encourages all researchers working in the Critical Zone to join the effort by registering on this site and contributing content.

CZEN’s primary goal is to create a network of observatories for investigating Critical Zone processes such as weathering and soil formation. Through this network, researchers can access and integrate data in a way that allows isolation of environmental variables and comparison of environmental effects across gradients of time, lithology, human disturbance, biological activity and topography.

Key questions driving CZEN

• What processes control fluxes of carbon, particulates and reactive gases?
• How do weathering processes nourish ecosystems?
• How do variations in, and perturbation to, chemical and physical weathering processes impact the Critical Zone?
• How do biogeochemical processes govern long-term sustainability of water and soil resources?

CZEN is supported by the National Science Foundation. An overview of CZEN’s research philosophy and agenda can be found in Frontiers in Exploration of the Critical Zone.