Type 2: The Future of Ecosystems and Extremes: Using Diverse Environmental Data Sets in Support of Regional to Global Earth-System Models and Predictions

我们国家的自然和管理生态系统对公共生计及其可持续未来至关重要。极端气候和天气事件对生态系统生产力造成重大风险，因为这类事件的破坏性最大，代价也最高。在改变的环境条件下，极端事件的频率、强度和/或持续时间的进一步增加也可能对生态系统造成不可恢复的损害。因此，全面观察、理解、记录和预测生态系统对极端环境条件的响应和恢复能力，以及地球自然系统和人类系统变化可能跨越不可逆阈值的程度，至关重要。只有通过对全范围环境条件下生态系统行为的观测证据，才能提高预测模型的性能。目前的生态、气象和水文观测与国家下一代国家生态观测网络（NEON）相结合，为实现全面跨越我国不同类型生态系统的新分析提供了一个令人兴奋的机会。本研究通过一系列预测工具进行协调校准、评估、增强和实验，包括：代表生态系统野外尺度机制的模型；高分辨率区域生态系统-气候模式；以及地球-人类相互联系系统的全球综合评估模型。通过这些研究，将确定受人为改变的极端天气和气候变化以及土地利用变化影响的生态系统的生产力、响应和复原力的区域特定阈值，这些阈值对生态系统服务构成严重影响。根据NEON观测结果对生态系统模型进行测试和评估，将确定忠实预测生态系统对极端条件的响应所需的关键模型能力。在本世纪末可能发生气候和环境变化的背景下，利用区域和全球人类-地球系统模型进行预测，还将能够对生态变化和复原力进行基于风险的评估。这可以通过在合理的人类排放和气候/生态反应范围内运行这些模型来实现。然后，这些区域生态系统-气候预测的大气输出也可以用作区域气候影响的其他详细研究的边界条件，例如空气质量和水资源（数量和质量）。总体而言，本研究的科学评估和预测将使地方利益攸关方以及国家和国际决策者能够就缓解和适应战略做出更明智的决定，特别是那些与保护受极端环境威胁的自然和管理生态系统有关的战略。

Our nation's natural and managed ecosystems are essential to public livelihood and its sustainable future. Extreme climate and weather events impose a substantial risk to ecosystem productivity, as such events are the most damaging and costly. Further increases in the frequency, strength, and/or duration of extreme events under altered environmental conditions may also result in irrecoverable damages to ecosystems. Therefore, it is of critical importance to comprehensively observe, understand, document, and predict ecosystems' response and resiliency to extreme environmental conditions and the extent to which irreversible thresholds may be crossed as a result of changes in the Earth's natural and human systems. Improved performance in predictive models is achieved only through observational evidence of ecosystem behavior under the full range of environmental conditions. The current suite of ecologic, meteorological, and hydrologic observations combined with the nation's next-generation National Ecologic Observation Network (NEON) allow an exciting opportunity to enable new analyses that comprehensively span the diverse types of ecosystems across our nation. This study undertakes coordinated calibration, evaluation, enhancement, and experimentation with a hierarchy of predictive tools that includes: models representing the field-scale mechanisms of ecosystems; a high-resolution regional ecosystem-climate model; as well as a global integrated assessment model of the linked earth-human systems. Through these, region-specific thresholds in the productivity, response, and resiliency of ecosystems governed by human-altered shifts in weather and climate extremes as well as land use, which pose severe implications for ecosystem services, will be identified.The testing and evaluation of ecosystem models against the NEON observations will identify the critical model capabilities required to faithfully predict ecosystem response to extreme conditions. Under the auspice of potential climate and environmental change through the end of this century, projections with regional and global human-earth systems models will also allow for a risk-based assessment of ecologic change and resiliency. This is possible through the ability to run these models across the range of plausible human emissions and the climate/ecologic response. The atmospheric outputs of these regional ecosystem-climate projections could then also be used as boundary conditions for other detailed studies of regional climate impacts - such as air quality and water resources (quantity and quality). Overall, the scientific assessments and predictions from this study will enable local stakeholders as well as national and international policymakers to make more informed decisions regarding mitigation and adaptation strategies - particularly those that are relevant to the protection of natural and managed ecosystems threatened by extreme environments.