LTER: Changing Disturbances, Ecological Legacies, and the Future of the Alaskan Boreal Forest

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Over the past century, Alaska has been warming twice as quickly as the global average, with large increases occurring in its interior boreal forests. This warmer, drier climate has triggered important changes to regional wildfire, pests and pathogen outbreaks, and permafrost thaw. The Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research (BNZ LTER) program will advance understanding of the impacts of changing climate and disturbance regimes on the Alaskan boreal forest and explore associated regional consequences on feedbacks to the climate system. In collaboration with Alaska Native communities, as well as state and federal land management agencies, the BNZ LTER program will identify vulnerabilities and explore adaptation opportunities to environmental change. The program will increase understanding of ecological theory and the role of the boreal biome and permafrost soils in the Earth System. The BNZ LTER will share results with a broader community via outreach to students and educators through their schoolyard LTER and fostering science programs for undergraduate students, first-generation college students, and the general public. A new Alaska Native Advisory Council, which will bring a dynamic and inclusive Alaska Native perspective into the BNZ program will be introduced with this renewal.This research program will focus on ecological legacies of past ecosystems transmitted through carryover of information and materials that support ecosystem recovery and stabilization. Changes in climate or disturbance regimes can modify key legacies and trigger rapid ecosystem reorganization into new recovery trajectories. These include shifts to new states that are unlikely to recover to the pre-disturbance ecosystem. Such shifts in the frequency and longevity of ecosystem states can restructure processes at the landscape scale. They can influence soil thermal states, hydrology, species composition and biotic interactions, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem services, and dynamics of social-ecological systems. The BNZ LTER program addresses the following questions: 1) how do legacies constrain the response of the Alaskan boreal forest to climate change, 2) how will these legacies affect future ecosystem trajectories, and 3) what are the local, regional, and global impacts of these emergent ecosystem trajectories now and in the future? Multiple mechanistic hypotheses about the role of legacies in ecosystem resilience and change will be tested using data from the site. Collection of long-term data will be continued and combined with data from new sites, experiments, and surveys. This will expand research to investigate new types of disturbance impacts. Statistical and process-based simulation models will be combined to predict current and future ecological dynamics and feedbacks at the landscape scale. It will identify social-ecological vulnerabilities and explore adaptation opportunities with Alaska Natives and Alaskan communities. This Long Term Ecological Research site is supported by The Division of Environmental Biology and the Office of Polar Programs.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.