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New Haven, Conn. -- Peter A. Raymond, assistant professor of ecosystem ecology in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale, has received the Estuarine Research Federation's 2005 Cronin Award for Early Achievement.
Raymond studies how climate and land use alter the amount of carbon transferred to rivers from the ground of the continents. The award recognizes his significant career accomplishments in research on the role of rivers, estuaries and coastal systems in regional and global carbon budgets and furthering "balance" of that budget worldwide.
"The Cronin Award is granted to an estuarine scientist who has shown great promise in work that is carried out within the six years after obtaining a doctorate," said Linda Schaffner, president of the Estuarine Research Federation. "We are pleased to recognize and honor the breadth and interdisciplinary nature of Professor Raymond's research interests, the quality of his publications, his teaching accomplishments and the impact he has had on the field of coastal ecology."
Raymond has long been involved in studies designed to establish the role of rivers and estuaries in the carbon budget of coastal ecosystems. He did his doctoral and post-doctoral work at the School of Marine Science, College of William and Mary and the Marine Biological Laboratory's Ecosystems Center and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, respectively. Those studies, on the York River in Virginia and the Parker River in Massachusetts, were some of the first to use radioactive carbon dating to determine the major flows of carbon in East Coast estuaries.
In 2002, Raymond joined the faculty of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where he has studied the age of river carbon and a possible relationship to its availability to bacteria that live in the rivers. He also collaborates with researchers at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University on methods to accurately measure the air-water exchange of carbon dioxide in rivers and estuaries. His current focus on East Coast and Arctic rivers and estuaries is funded by the Hudson River Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
He has authored or co-authored 16 papers, including a 2003 study published in Science in collaboration with researchers at the Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Milbrook, N.Y. suggesting that inorganic carbon export from agricultural lands may offset some of the proposed carbon sequestration due to reforestation.