Collaborative Research: GCR: Co-Defining Climate Refugia to Inform the Management of Mountain Headwater Systems

人口增长和气候变化对公共土地的压力越来越大，而公共土地提供了清洁水、动植物栖息地等关键生态系统服务，并通过旅游和自然资源获得收入。为了确保服务的可持续性，土地管理者分配有限的资源，以减轻社会与环境之间不断变化的压力；然而，土地管理决策受到科学限制和科学家、决策者和公众之间沟通不足的挑战。该项目旨在通过确定在气候变化和其他人为干扰的情况下提供稳定生态系统服务的地区，为土地管理决策提供信息。该项目团队代表了气候科学、地质学、水文学、社会科学和生态学，包括来自西班牙裔服务机构和社区大学的学生。该小组将与决策者合作，开发测量和预测技术，以估计本世纪生态系统可能在何处、如何以及何时经历不可逆转的变化。该项目将建立一种可转让的方法，利用科学和公共优先事项来绘制风险和可持续生态系统服务地图，为气候变化背景下的土地管理决策提供信息。对于许多重视和/或研究城市-荒地界面生态系统服务的人群来说，避难所的概念（可映射的景观单元，可以缓冲当代气候变化）具有重要意义。然而，没有统一的框架来提供新的数据或想法，而且在预测未来条件（包括气候变化和其他社会压力）方面存在技术障碍。该项目将开发对水、能源和植被的新观测，以改进下一代陆地模型，通过土地管理者、公民和跨学科科学家之间的合作共同产生难民估计。它将承担一项复杂的任务，将公共价值、土地管理者的投入和气候变化预测结合起来，共同定义难民特征，并预测气候变化和其他人为强迫下难民的位置和持久性。该研究将产生三个具体进展：(1)整合和定义与公众、管理者和科学家相关的生态系统服务价值的趋同蓝图，作为表征避难所的一种手段；(2)改进基于过程的模型结构，以预测未来避难所的动态、阈值和边界；(3)一个新的建模框架，以分离生态系统变化预测中的不确定性来源。该奖项由水文科学项目共同资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Population growth and climate change increasingly stress public lands that provide key ecosystem services such as clean water, habitat for plants and animals, and income via tourism and natural resources. To ensure that services remain sustainable, land managers allocate limited resources to alleviate evolving stressors between society and the environment; however, land management decisions are challenged by scientific limitations and inadequate communication among scientists, decision-makers, and the public. This project aims to inform land management decisions by identifying regions that provide stable ecosystem services despite climate change and other human-caused disturbance. The project team – representing climate science, geology, hydrology, social science, and ecology – includes students from a Hispanic-Serving Institution and community colleges. The team will work with decision-makers to develop measurement and prediction technologies to estimate where, how, and when ecosystems may experience irreversible change this century. The project will establish a transferrable method to map at-risk and sustainable ecosystem services using both science and public priorities to inform land management decisions in the context of a changing climate. The concept of refugia – the mappable landscape units that are buffered from contemporary climate change – is significant to many population segments that value and/or study ecosystem services at the urban-wildland interface. However, no unified framework exists in which to contribute new data or ideas, and there are technical barriers to projecting future conditions, including climate change and other societal pressures. This project will develop novel observations of water, energy and vegetation to improve a next-generation terrestrial model to co-produce refugia estimates through collaboration among land managers, citizens, and cross-disciplinary scientists. It will undertake the complex task of combining public values, land manager input, and an ensemble of climate change projections to co-define refugia characteristics and predict the location and persistence of refugia under climate change and other anthropogenic forcings. The research will produce three specific advances: (1) a convergent blueprint for integrating and defining the value of ecosystem services that are relevant to the public, managers, and scientists as a means to characterize refugia, (2) improved process-based model structure to predict the dynamics, thresholds, and boundaries of future refugia, and (3) a novel modeling framework to separate sources of uncertainty in projections of ecosystem change.This award is co-funded by the Hydrologic Sciences program.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.