RoL: FELS Conference: A Fading Cryosphere Shifting Temperature and Stoichiometry in Mountain Lakes and Streams: A US-China Cooperative Workshop

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This project supports a workshop in April 2019 at the Flathead Lake Biological Station (Montana) involving researchers from the United States of America and China. The cryosphere is the frozen part of the Earth and involves glacier ice, snowpack, and permafrost. Around the world, cryosphere melt is accelerating, including in mountain regions. These changes are important because mountain regions supply water to 40% of the world's population. However, in many situations it is not well-understood how the changing cryosphere impacts aquatic ecosystems such as lakes and rivers and the organisms that live in them. Furthermore, research conducted in different countries is often not well-integrated and data platforms for sharing of similar data are not well-developed. This workshop will support a 5-day meeting of researchers from the USA and China who are studying how the changing cryosphere affects aquatic ecosystems in mountain regions. An emphasis will be on how underlying biological similarities (Rules of Life) can help draw connections between regions and how data platforms can be developed to maximize efficiency and effectiveness in scientific investigations of these changes. This workshop will involve about 20 USA researchers at a broad range of career stages (graduate students to professors) and a similar cohort of Chinese counterparts. Mountain regions are experiencing rapid transitions in the cryosphere, losing permanent snow and ice that buffer discharge, shape regional environmental and habitat conditions, and provide diverse ecosystem services for humanity. The ongoing changes in the cryosphere are widespread, complex, and affect a variety of key parameters of alpine lakes and streams such as temperature, transparency, discharge, and nutrient supply. Documenting, understanding, and forecasting these impacts is challenging and requires broad interdisciplinary collaborations. Building off of the success of a first workshop held at Qinghai Lake in China in August 2017, a second workshop to be held in the USA has two goals: 1. assessing how fundamental similarities in biota (such as the temperature dependence of metabolism or the stoichiometric signature of biomass) can help understand the impacts of cryosphere loss on aquatic ecosystems and 2. establishing a framework for US/China joint data centers, producing a database across multiple sites in both countries. This workshop will foster international cooperation via collaboration across US and Chinese researchers working on a common, pressing environmental issue in both regions, establishing conceptual frameworks and building precedents for data sharing and collaboration. The highly interdisciplinary nature of the collaboration workshop will also provide important professional development opportunities and training for participants of all career stages including graduate students and postdocs. More information about the workshop can be found at https://renzedyk.wixsite.com/us-china-workshop2This 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.