NRT-HDR: A team-based training paradigm integrating informatics and ecology

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Earth's deserts, tropical forests, and other ecosystems, natural or managed, provide valuable goods and services to society. These ecosystems, however, are threatened by extreme weather events, changes in land use, habitat fragmentation, and species loss. The expertise to understand the impacts of such threats will require teams who collectively bring to bear modern methods in ecology, data and information processing, computing, statistics, and mathematical modeling. However, such team-based, scientific approaches are rare in formal graduate education programs. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to Northern Arizona University will address these challenges by developing a team-based graduate training program in ecological and environmental informatics, with a focus on team-based research combined with the development of strong expert and public communication skills and modern collaborative skills broadly applicable beyond academia. The project anticipates training forty-eight (48) PhD students, including twenty-four (24) funded trainees, with an additional 100 graduate students (MS and PhD) benefiting from various aspects of the NRT training program.This NRT training program is couched in the interdisciplinary research theme of understanding and forecasting the properties and processes of terrestrial ecosystems, especially the impact of and feedbacks to global change. The field is being flooded with data (e.g., from various ecological and Earth observatory networks) that are critical to understanding and forecasting terrestrial ecosystem responses. However, most graduate students and scientists lack the quantitative, computational, and collaborative skills to leverage such data to address grand, challenging questions. This NRT program will train the next generation of scientists to overcome these limitations, with a focus on training in informatics tools and team-science skills that facilitate solutions to complex problems, motivated by the question: How does anthropogenic global change affect the health and productivity of terrestrial ecosystems? In this innovative graduate training program, trainees will create their own scientist profile in ecological and environmental informatics by building substantive depth in a primary core competency and establishing breadth in other primary and supporting areas. The primary areas include data analytics and computing, analysis and synthesis, and terrestrial ecosystem science; the supporting areas include relevant data collection tools and products as well as skillsets in communication, collaboration, and team building. Key elements of this NRT program are scalable and sustainable, including: (1) a curriculum that allows students to personalize their training, (2) workshops, courses, and other activities that focus on team skills and applying these skills to collaborative research projects, (3) preparation for a range of careers via professional development and applied internship opportunities, and (4) the graduate ecological and environmental informatics certificate that is accessible to students in a range of STEM fields. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.