Dr. Grimm studies how human-environment interactions and climate variability and change influence biogeochemical processes in both riverine and urban ecosystems, collaborating with hydrologists, engineers, geologists, chemists, sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists. She is PI and co-director of the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project, a comprehensive study of the Phoenix metropolis and surroundings. With her research group and collaborators, Grimm investigates diverse topics, mostly focused on nitrogen cycling and retention in the context of landscape heterogeneity, including: 1) nitrate transport and retention in urban, agricultural, and natural streams; 2) biogeochemistry and hot spots of N transformation in urban landscapes; 3) effects of urban atmospheric deposition on ecosystem processes in deserts; 4) impacts of long-term climate variability and change on desert stream structure and function (nutrient retention, metabolism, and plant and invertebrate communities). She is a past president of the Ecological Society of America and the North American Benthological Society and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Grimm was a contributing author of the recently released synthesis report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. In that vein, she hopes to contribute to strategies for cities to both mitigate and adapt to environmental changes that are here today and increasing in severity.
Visit her Sycamore Creek research project pages