Biological & Environmental Research

Understanding how genomic information is translated to functional capabilities, and the roles of Earth’s biogeochemical systems so we can predict climate decades or centuries into the future.

The DOE Office of Science's Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program conducts research in sustainable biofuel production, improved carbon storage, climate prediction, and contaminant bioremediation.

This work advances our understanding of the roles of Earth’s atmosphere, land, oceans, sea ice, and subsurface in predicting climate feedbacks and understanding earth system process dynamics. Research results help improve our predictive understanding of the earth system across scales.

BER projects supported by LANL

The Los Alamos National Laboratory leads two Science Focus Area (SFA) for the DOE Genome Science Program. Microbial Carbon Cycling and Bacterial-Fungal Interactions both combine DOE strengths in microbial genomics, computation, user facility capabilities, and ecosystem sciences to further a comprehensive understanding of the role of microbes in ecosystems. These programs stand to improve many aspects of ecology from climate modeling and management to soil productivity and resilience.
The Los Alamos Field Instrument Deployments and Operations Office manages the BER Atmospheric Radiation Measurement infrastructure’s deployments to the Azores Islands in the Atlantic and two mobile facilities deployed worldwide, to study climate impacts.
LANL is responsible for developing next-generation ocean, sea ice, land ice, and computational performance components of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model.
Through the Interoperable Design of Extreme-scale Application Software (IDEAS) project, LANL increases scientific productivity by realizing the potential of advanced software and computing resources, with applications in watershed science.
LANL leads coastal science initiatives for BER in the Arctic, through the Interdisciplinary Research for Arctic Coastal Environments project, and coastal ocean model development for Integrated Coastal Modeling of the mid-Atlantic region.
LANL leads the fine-scale model development of arctic terrestrial and subsurface processes for the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment in the Arctic. The Lab conducts experiments at the surface and subsurface through synoptic surveys of small- and large-scale hydrological features.
The High-Latitude Application and Testing of Earth System Models project applies high-performance, multi-scale models to study how changes in the high-latitude Earth system respond and contribute to global change.