Lluís Gómez is an ecosystem biogeochemist who uses high-mountain waterscapes—including streams, lakes, and groundwater—as natural laboratories to investigate how human- and climate-driven changes (such as droughts, shifts in snow and ice melt, land-use changes, and atmospheric deposition) affect the transport and biogeochemical transformation of nutrients and carbon across multiple spatial and temporal scales in remote watersheds.
His current research interests are divided into three main areas: 1) Characterising hydro-biogeochemical regimes in headwater streams, rivers, and lakes; 2) Linking physical, geochemical, and biological processes that govern the delivery, cycling, and fate of biogeochemical species within watersheds; 3) Exploring processes at ecohydrological interfaces, including terrestrial–aquatic, atmospheric–aquatic, and surface–subsurface transition zones. He uses a cross-disciplinary approach saddled between landscape ecology, watershed hydrology and ecosystem biogeochemistry. In recent years, his research has been enhanced by the use of novel do-it-yourself (DIY) technologies—low-cost, microprocessor-based systems that record environmental parameters at high frequency over long periods. These tools expand monitoring capacity and reveal fine-scale ecosystem dynamics. Complementing these approaches, he increasingly applies catchment and lake remote-sensing techniques to improve spatial and temporal understanding of ecosystem processes in complex mountain landscapes.
Before his current position, he has been awarded four competitive postdoctoral positions: the first (2017–2018) at Umeå University (Sweden); the second (2019–2020) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland); the third (April–November 2021) at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB-CSIC, Spain); and the fourth as a La Caixa Junior Leader Postdoctoral Researcher at CREAF.