Duke has named Daniel Richter as the Theodore S. Coile Distinguished Professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment’s Division of Earth and Climate Sciences.

Richter and his students investigate how soils form, and how they are changing in contemporary human-altered landscapes. He is particularly interested in subsoils and weathering rock, called regolith, that lies beneath the top layers of soil but above hard bedrock. Extensive research and analysis by Richter and his colleagues demonstrate that soil’s lower boundary is much deeper than previously acknowledged.

“Soil blankets nearly all of Earth’s terrestrial surfaces — from tundra to tropics — and with such exceeding physical, chemical and biological diversity!” he said. “In many ways, soil defines our planet, yet what was true to Leonardo da Vinci in 1500 is still true today, that ‘We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.’” 

Richter’s lifelong fascination with soil spans lab, field and classroom settings.

“Students love his classes because they combine such deep scientific knowledge with engaging experiential activities,” said Lori Bennear, Stanback Dean of the Nicholas School. “His scientific and educational insights have pushed out the boundary of soil science in pivotal ways worthy of Dan’s appointment as a distinguished professor.”

Even as a student, Richter says he was attracted to decades-old research sites where biogeochemical changes in soil have been directly observed through time. Since 1990 he has worked at the U.S. Forest Service’s Calhoun Experimental Forest in South Carolina, where he leads a long-term field experiment of soil change that began in 1957. The research portrays in detail how soil supports and is altered by the growth of a forest over nearly 70 years. Informed by this work, Richter and his students have published nearly 40 papers and a book, Understanding Soil Change: Soil Sustainability Over Millennia, Centuries and Decades, on the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and 12 other chemical elements.

“Dan has been the driving force in transforming the Calhoun Experimental Forest from a small U.S. Forest Service research site into a highly productive research facility used by more than 15 laboratories and more than 100 investigators,” Bennear said. “At the Calhoun site, Dan orchestrates environmental anthropologists and historians, geophysicists and geochemists, soil scientists and ecologists, and modelers and empiricists to study one of America’s most agriculturally eroded and gullied landscapes.”

The Calhoun project is one of 200 long-term soil-ecosystem experiments worldwide that Richter has inventoried in an extensive database maintained by the International Soil Carbon Network and reviewed in papers and his book.

For a decade, Richter has also collaborated with the international Anthropocene Working Group, which in 2023 proposed that our current geological epoch, the Holocene, be renamed to the Anthropocene. He has worked and taught with humanities scholars providing scientific support for a Nasher Museum of Art exhibit called Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene. With Duke’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, he co-produced the film The Education of Bruno Latour: From the Critical Zone to the Anthropocene.

Since 2018, Richter has studied urban soil science in Durham, Detroit and New Orleans neighborhoods, where legacy soil contamination is a problem, and in California communities devastated by the Palisades and Eaton wildfires.

“Dan’s research has evolved over the years from studying natural soils to monitoring the legacy of lead contamination in urban soils across the U.S.,” said Avner Vengosh, chair of the Division of Earth and Climate Sciences.

Richter earned a Ph.D. from Duke in 1980. After working as a research associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources, he returned to Duke as associate professor in 1987.