Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for the Global Environment Nutrient Network (GEN-2)

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The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.Aquatic nutrient pollution, including nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P), poses an existential threat to both humans and ecosystems. Its impacts, which are felt coast-to-coast and around the world, include noxious algal blooms in streams, rivers and the coastal ocean, ocean hypoxia and acidification, loss of inland and coastal fisheries, and the production of potent greenhouse gases that disproportionately contribute to an increase in temperature in the environment. The ?Three R?s? for mitigating aquatic nutrient pollution are: Reduction: decrease nutrient released during the production of energy (N) and food (N and P); Removal: retain P and denitrify bioavailable N to N2 gas following its creation and use; and Recovery: capture and reuse N and P from waste streams. Environmental engineers have made great strides in developing treatment systems for the removal and recovery of nutrients from waste streams. The next frontier lies in optimizing networks of treatment systems at the watershed-to-continental scale while taking into account: (1) all three R?s (not just removal and recovery); (2) natural attenuation by terrestrial vegetation, wetlands, and stream corridors (i.e., the stream and associated riparian and hyporheic zones); and (3) the non-linear responses of ecosystems to nutrient loading. In this grant we will carry out planning exercises and three workshops with the goal of developing a Convergent Engineering Research Center (C-ERC) to address these grand challenges. Our NSF C-ERC will be founded on a computational platform (GEN-2) that brings together engineers, hydrologists, oceanographers, ecologists, economists, political scientists, education experts, and a broad cross-section of stakeholders, in pursuit of practical solutions to nutrient pollution at continental-to-global scales.Through planning exercises and three workshops we will select and refine our: (1) team of scholars, learners, and stakeholders; (2) research questions and approaches; (3) educational and outreach activities; (4) leadership structure and analytical tools needed to promote deep collaboration among team members; (5) approach for ensuring that engineering education and under-represented minority recruitment/inclusion is ?in the DNA? of everything we do; and (6) analytical tools for assessing the Center?s impact. Our planning products will be informed by boundary organization theory, and co-produced by a diverse group of highly qualified scholars (including 23 researchers across 11 universities and three countries) working in four complementary teams. The Watershed Team will develop GEN-2 and assure that it seamlessly integrates with other continental-scale modeling frameworks, assimilates real-time and historical data, and advances the design of next generation water quality observational networks. The Ocean Team will utilize existing regional ocean models to evaluate the relative importance of land-based nutrient sources and natural oceanographic processes (such as nutrient upwelling) on coastal ocean water quality. The Policy Team will evaluate possible solutions to nutrient pollution through the lens of cost-benefit analysis, behavioral economics (using randomized trials to evaluate the long-term efficacy of proposed interventions), and political science (using case studies to uncover governance innovations likely to facilitate management transitions). Finally, the Society Team will utilize NSF I-Corps principles to elucidate goals and ?pain points? of stakeholders and foster an inclusive ecosystem of learners, scholars, and stakeholders that reflects the demographic make-up of the broader community.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.