CAREER: The Legacy of Wildfire on Carbon Watershed Biogeochemistry

职业生涯：野火对碳流域生物地球化学的影响

• 批准号: 1942068
• 负责人: Rebecca Barnes
• 金额: $ 84.92万
• 依托单位: Colorado College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-05-01 至 2023-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1942068&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Legacy; Wildfire; Carbon; Watershed

Wildfires occur more regularly and with greater severity throughout the western United States. In addition to threatening our safety, these fires also change ecosystems. Severe fires release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Wildfires also change the way carbon and water move and are stored within ecosystems. This project aims to understand how severe fire alters the movement and fate of carbon from land to water over multiple timescales and forest types. Field observations, laboratory experiments, and computer models will quantify the size and fate of terrestrial and aquatic carbon pools. Results will improve our ability to understand the feedbacks between a changing climate, increasing wildfires, and forest carbon cycling. In addition, this project will create a partnership between Colorado College, a small liberal arts school, and two large research focused universities: University of Utah and Texas A&M University. This partnership will provide increased opportunities for undergraduates, providing research experiences both within and outside the classroom. The project will train more than 75 undergraduate students and two postdoctoral scholars. Results from this project will be shared with the Colorado Springs community through an outreach-oriented exhibit at the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College via a partnership with an artist. Severe fire results in large shifts in terrestrial ecosystem carbon (C) stocks and alters watershed hydrology, shifting flow paths and thus the sources and processing of organic matter to aquatic ecosystems. Currently, terrestrial ecosystem C models do not adequately incorporate inland waterways, resulting in a significant overestimate of net ecosystem production, i.e. the size of the terrestrial C sink. The overarching goal of this research is to better understand how disturbance alters C processing along flow paths within the terrestrial environment and the fate of C within aquatic ecosystems. The project will leverage field campaigns, seasonal and year-round precipitation and stream water collection, controlled laboratory experiments, and modeling efforts at four sites across Colorado that form a “natural experiment”. Project study sites include two subalpine sites and two montane sites, each consisting of one landscape with tree reestablishment and one with few to no established seedlings or saplings, almost 20 years post fire. C stocks and processes will be quantified and characterized across these gradients to better identify causal relationships that will help predict how ecosystems will respond to ongoing and future disturbance. Further, project results will have important implications for incorporating disturbance and aquatic systems into ecosystem C models, with the potential to inform paleoecological reconstructions of fire’s impact on ecological processes.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.

野火更定期地发生，并且在整个美国西部的严重程度更大。除了威胁我们的安全外，这些火灾还改变了生态系统。严重的火灾将大量碳释放到大气中，导致气候变化。野火也会改变碳和水的移动方式，并存储在生态系统中。该项目旨在了解强烈的火灾如何改变碳从陆地到水的流动和命运在多个时间尺度和森林类型上。现场观察，实验室实验和计算机模型将量化陆生和水生碳池的大小和命运。结果将提高我们了解不断变化的攀岩，增加野火和森林碳循环之间的反馈的能力。此外，该项目将在科罗拉多大学，一所小型文科学校和两项重点研究的大学之间建立合作伙伴关系：犹他大学和德克萨斯A＆M大学。这种伙伴关系将为大学生提供更多的机会，从而为课堂内外提供研究经验。该项目将培训75多名本科生和两名博士后学者。该项目的结果将与科罗拉多斯普林斯社区通过与艺术家的合作伙伴关系在科罗拉多学院的美术中心举行的面向外展活动。严重的火灾导致陆地生态系统碳（C）库存（C）股票的大幅变化，并改变了流域的水文学，转移流动路径，从而将有机物的来源和加工到水生生态系统中。目前，陆地生态系统C模型尚未充分纳入内陆水道，从而大量高估了净生态系统生产，即陆地C下水道的大小。这项研究的总体目标是更好地了解干扰如何改变陆地环境内的流动路径和水生生态系统中C的命运。该项目将利用现场活动，季节性和全年降水和溪流收集，受控实验室实验以及在科罗拉多州四个地点进行建模的工作，这些地点形成了“自然实验”。项目研究地点包括两个亚高山站点和两个山地地点，每个地点包括一个带有树木重建的景观，一个景观和一个较少到没有固定的幼苗或树苗组成，近20年后大火。 C股票和过程将在这些梯度中进行量化和表征，以更好地识别灾难性关系，这将有助于预测生态系统如何应对持续和将来的灾难。此外，项目结果将对将灾难和水生系统纳入生态系统C模型具有重要意义，并有可能为火灾对火的影响的古生态重建提供信息。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用基金会的知识分子和更广泛的影响审查审查标准来通过评估来诚实地通过评估来诚实地支持。