Denise Mueller-Dum

I am interested in the flow of the ele­ment car­bon bet­ween land, oce­an, and at­mo­s­phe­re. Ri­vers are very im­portant for the carbon cycle, be­cau­se they trans­port land-de­ri­ved ma­te­ri­al to the oce­an – and they are also sour­ces of green­hou­se ga­ses like car­bon di­oxi­de to the at­mo­s­phe­re. Un­der­stan­ding the role of ri­vers in the car­bon cy­cle is im­portant in the con­text of cli­ma­te chan­ge. Sou­theast Asi­an ri­vers are of spe­cial in­te­rest be­cau­se of their ex­tre­me­ly high con­tent of dis­sol­ved plant ma­te­ri­al, thus of their high po­ten­ti­al for green­hou­se gas emis­si­on. Cur­rent­ly, I am using two com­ple­men­ta­ry tools to in­ves­ti­ga­te the­se sys­tems: field work and nu­me­ri­cal mo­de­ling. I mea­su­re dif­fe­rent forms of car­bon in Sou­theast Asi­an ri­vers and I use this data to va­li­da­te a glo­bal bio­s­phe­re mo­del. Mo­dels can help us to pre­dict the re­ac­tion of an eco­sys­tem to cer­tain stres­sors such as cli­ma­te chan­ge. 
As sci­en­tist, I am try­ing to ge­ne­ra­te new know­ledge and I be­lie­ve that sharing this know­ledge is part of my job. This is why I try to com­mu­ni­ca­te and dis­cuss the re­sults of my work with the pu­blic through pu­blic lec­tu­res, so­ci­al me­dia and using my ex­pe­ri­ence as a for­mer fre­e­lan­ce jour­na­list. I am al­ways keen on try­ing out new com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on stra­te­gies and ex­ci­ted about the pu­blic in­te­rest in re­se­arch.

Here you can find an excerpt of my story "The life cycle".