Tracer Injection Experiments in RiveRs And Streams
A global open-access database of solute transport experiments in rivers and streams — built and managed by the González-Pinzón Lab at UNM to enable physics-informed machine learning models and advance our understanding of river corridor processes worldwide.
What is TIERRAS
River corridors — including their adjacent and underlying sediments — are ecosystems where waters from different sources mix. This mixing controls the fate of dissolved solutes such as nutrients, minerals, pharmaceuticals, and contaminants. TIERRAS assembles field experiments from around the globe to build the data foundation needed for the next generation of river transport models.
The database aggregates results from controlled tracer injection studies — the gold standard for quantifying solute transport, transient storage, and hyporheic exchange in rivers. These datasets are rare, hard-won, and historically scattered across individual research groups.
TIERRAS is the data backbone for developing interpretable, adaptable transport models that combine classical hydrological theory with modern AI approaches — enabling predictions for rivers that have never been directly instrumented.
Users can browse, filter, and visualize the dataset interactively through the TIERRAS web portal — searching by river type, geography, experimental parameters, and more. Data can be downloaded directly for research and modeling.
Researchers worldwide can submit tracer experiment data to TIERRAS via the portal's upload interface. The platform is designed to grow through community contributions, building toward a comprehensive global inventory of river transport observations.
People
TIERRAS is led by the González-Pinzón Lab at UNM's Center for Water and the Environment, in collaboration with partner institutions funded by the National Science Foundation.
Get Started
Whether you're exploring river transport data, building new models, or want to share your own tracer experiments with the community — TIERRAS is open to all.