CAREER: Fire impacts on forest carbon recovery in a warming world: training the next generation of Earth analysts by exploring a missing scale of observations

职业：在变暖的世界中火灾对森林碳恢复的影响：通过探索缺失的观测规模来培训下一代地球分析师

• 批准号: 1846384
• 负责人: Jennifer Balch
• 金额: $ 93.18万
• 依托单位: University of Colorado at Boulder
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-03-01 至 2025-02-28
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1846384&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Fire; impacts; forest; carbon

The number and extent of wildfires are increasing the western U.S. forests. These forests are important in regulating the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Wildfires have reduced the amount of carbon western U.S. forests accumulate by 15-fold since the 1980s. This CAREER award will explore the critical question: is carbon recovery in burned forests changing as regional warming and consequent wildfire disturbance size increase. Innovative remote sensing using Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), NEON's Airborne Observatory, and the GEDI satellite will allow rapid monitoring of forest structure at very high resolution across thousands of hectares-providing a critical and often missing scale of observations. With these remote sensing data and other advances, regional to continental scale ecology can now explore large areas at very fine scales. However major impediments exist in taking full advantage of this new technology. Training to actually harness this data revolution significantly lags behind the data availability. This CAREER award will address this need through training the next generation of Earth analysts in data and compute-intensive science, cutting-edge ecosystem carbon measuring techniques, and large-team collaboration. This award will advance fundamental understanding of how aboveground biomass recovery trajectories vary as a function of fire size and severity, drought, and conifer forest type (1984-present) across the western U.S. This research will: 1) apply emerging UAS technologies and methods to estimate tree-level aboveground biomass to then explore carbon recovery post-fire in the NEON southern Rockies domain; 2) explore fundamental drivers of carbon recovery post-disturbance across a chronosequence of fire history in conifer forests of the western U.S. using space-based observations; and 3) build a national network of over 100 ecosystem scientists, predominantly graduate students, who will be enabled to conduct data-intensive exploration of forest carbon dynamics in response to disturbance within NEON domains. Education efforts include a distributed graduate seminar taught simultaneously at five universities, open education modules delivered on Earth Lab's learning portal for Earth data science that currently reaches tens of thousands of users, and a Forest Carbon Codefest that will build collaborative efforts around key methodological advances, data coding challenges, and cloud-compute workflows. Overall this CAREER award will lead to better understanding of when forests shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources under changing fire regimes and help to train the next generation of data-capable Earth scientists.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.

野火的数量和范围正在增加美国西部的森林。这些森林在调节大气中的碳量方面很重要。自20世纪80年代以来，野火使美国西部森林积累的碳量减少了15倍。这个职业奖将探索一个关键问题：被烧毁的森林中的碳恢复是否会随着地区变暖和随之而来的野火干扰规模的增加而变化。使用无人驾驶航空系统(UAS)、霓虹灯空中观测站和GEDI卫星的创新遥感将能够在数千公顷的范围内以非常高的分辨率快速监测森林结构--提供关键的、往往缺失的观测尺度。有了这些遥感数据和其他进展，区域到大陆尺度的生态学现在可以在非常精细的尺度上探索大片区域。然而，在充分利用这项新技术方面存在重大障碍。实际利用这场数据革命的培训远远落后于数据可用性。这一职业奖项将通过培训下一代地球分析员在数据和计算密集型科学、尖端生态系统碳测量技术和大型团队合作方面满足这一需求。该奖项将促进对地上生物量恢复轨迹如何随整个美国西部的火灾规模和严重程度、干旱和针叶林类型(1984-现在)的函数变化的基本理解。这项研究将：1)应用新兴的UAS技术和方法来估计树木水平的地上生物量，然后探索霓虹灯南部落基山脉区域火灾后的碳恢复；2)利用空间观测，探索美国西部针叶林火灾历史的时间序列中碳恢复后干扰的基本驱动因素；以及3)建立一个由100多名生态系统科学家组成的国家网络，这些科学家主要是研究生，他们将能够对森林碳动态进行数据密集型探索，以应对霓虹灯领域内的干扰。教育工作包括在五所大学同时授课的分布式研究生研讨会、在地球实验室的地球数据科学学习门户网站上提供的开放教育模块(目前已覆盖数万用户)以及森林碳代码测试，该测试将围绕关键的方法进步、数据编码挑战和云计算工作流建立合作努力。总体而言，这一职业奖项将使人们更好地了解在不断变化的火灾制度下，森林何时从碳汇转变为碳源，并有助于培训下一代具有数据能力的地球科学家。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Fire threatens the diversity and structure of tropical gallery forests

• DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.3347
• 发表时间: 2021-01-01
• 期刊: ECOSPHERE
• 影响因子: 2.7
• 作者: Armenteras, Dolors;Meza, Maria Constanza;Retana, Javier
• 通讯作者: Retana, Javier

Democratizing macroecology: Integrating unoccupied aerial systems with the National Ecological Observatory Network

• DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.4206
• 发表时间: 2022-08
• 期刊: Ecosphere
• 影响因子: 2.7
• 作者: M. J. Koontz;Victoria M. Scholl;Anna I. Spiers;M. Cattau;J. Adler;J. McGlinchy;T. Goulden;B. Melbourne;J. Balch

Modern Pyromes: Biogeographical Patterns of Fire Characteristics across the Contiguous United States

现代火场：美国本土火灾特征的生物地理模式

• DOI: 10.3390/fire5040095
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Fire
• 作者: Cattau, Megan;Mahood, Adam;Balch, Jennifer;Wessman, Carol
• 通讯作者: Wessman, Carol

Integrating National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Airborne Remote Sensing and In-Situ Data for Optimal Tree Species Classification

• DOI: 10.3390/rs12091414
• 发表时间: 2020-04
• 期刊: Remote. Sens.
• 作者: Victoria M. Scholl;M. Cattau;M. Joseph;J. Balch

Warming weakens the night-time barrier to global fire

• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04325-1
• 发表时间: 2022-02-17
• 期刊: NATURE
• 影响因子: 64.8
• 作者: Balch, Jennifer K.;Abatzoglou, John T.;Williams, A. Park
• 通讯作者: Williams, A. Park