Annette Dathe                

Email:ad273@cornell.edu
Phone: n/a
Office: 72 Riley Robb Hall

Annette joined the Soil and Water Lab in September 2003. As an environmental scientist, she is skilled in the natural sciences with emphasis on soil physics, physical geography and modeling processes such as water and solute transport. For her master thesis (Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany) she worked on water flow in a macroporous soil and got involved in to digitizing, measuring, and quantifying soil structure. She continued her education on to a PhD (University of Goettingen, Germany), investigating soil structure via digital image analysis. Her research focused on measuring the fractal dimension of the interface between solid matrix and pores from soil thin sections. The results were compared to classical soil physics measurements as the retention curve and particle size distribution. After coming to Cornell University, she continued developing programs for measuring structure in a quantitative way; for example, measuring lacunarity as a value for translationally invariance, measuring the multifractal spectrum and analyzing the correlation between fractal dimensions of solid matrix and pore space. Since joining the soil and water research group, she is involved (together with Yuniati Zevi) in investigating transport mechanisms of colloids in unsaturated media. Annette is developing the image analyzing procedures to track the colloid movement (2d images) and ascertain the position of retained colloids (3d images), using spectral confocal microscopy.

Recent Publications

Dathe, A., Thullner, M., 2005. The relationship between fractal properties of solid matrix and pore space in porous media. Geoderma 129/3-4, 279-290. Available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/ .

Pendleton, D., Dathe, A. Baveye, P., 2005. Influence of image resolution and evaluation algorithm on estimates of the lacunarity of porous media. Physical Review E 72, 041306. Available online at http://scitation.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PLEEE8&Volume=72&Issue=4

Steenhuis, T.S., McCarthy, J.F., Crist, J.T., Zevi, Y., Baveye, P.C., Throop, J.A., Fehrman, R.L., Dathe, A., Richards, B.K., 2005. Reply to “Comments on ‘Pore-Scale Visualization of Colloid Transport and Retention in Partly Saturated Porous Media” by Wan, J., Tokunaga, T.K. Vadose Zone Journal 4, 957-958. Available online at http://vzj.scijournals.org/cgi/reprint/4/4/957 .

Dathe, A., Tarquis, M. A., Perrier, E., 2005. Multifractal analysis of the pore- and solid-phases in binary two-dimensional images of natural porous structures. Geoderma, accepted.

Perrier, E., Tarquis, M. A., Dathe, A., 2005. A Java Applet for Fractal and Multifractal Analysis of Two-Dimensional Images. Geoderma, accepted.