Collaborative Research: From Peaks To Slopes To Communities, Tropical Glacierized Volcanoes As Sentinels of Global Change: Integrated Impacts On Water, Plants and Elemental Cycling

合作研究：从山峰到斜坡到社区，热带冰川火山作为全球变化的哨兵：对水、植物和元素循环的综合影响

• 批准号: 2317853
• 负责人: Jeff La Frenierre
• 金额: $ 28.71万
• 依托单位: Gustavus Adolphus College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-09-15 至 2027-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2317853&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Peaks; Slopes; Communities

In the inner tropics, glaciers are exclusively found of volcano peaks above unique Andean páramo ecosystems that serve as global biodiversity hotspots, harbor some of the highest carbon stocks per unit area on Earth, and sustain Indigenous agrarian Kichwa communities who have stewarded the land and waters for generations. Glaciers there are fast-disappearing under climate change, yet the vast majority of studies on glacier retreat and downstream impacts are concentrated in mid- to high-latitudes. With Ecuadorian collaborators at academic, governmental, and community institutions, the project’s overarching research objective is to determine how climate change drives glacier retreat on culturally and ecologically critical Andean volcanoes in the inner tropics, triggering impacts on water supply, vegetation and land-use, and elemental feedbacks to the climate. To ensure benefits to Kichwa stewards of the páramos, the approach includes co-production of predictive models of future change with the historically marginalized Kichwa communities living at the mountain bases. Engagement with the communities will yield a framework for ethically weaving together Indigenous and scientific understandings of earth systems–which is lacking in the Andes. Closer to home, at and around the U.S. home institutions, the project will develop activities for Indigenous university science students and Latin American/Indigenous high school students to help them face achievement gaps for science careers while acknowledging their heritage. Through collaboration events, the project team, as participants of the Global North’s disproportionate contributions to global change, endeavors to fulfill their obligations to Indigenous peoples, lands, and water in the Global South, in their own states, and with implications for science-Indigenous community partnerships elsewhere.This project provides the first systematic investigation on glacier mass balance processes in the inner tropics, models the consequences of accelerated plant succession in deglacierized landscapes, and implements the first assessment of sulfur and metals controls on páramo carbon stores. Its interdisciplinary work plan will further uncover hidden subsurface flow paths of meltwater that influence the timing of stream discharge and the weathering and export of solutes; demonstrate complex feedbacks among plant succession, soil moisture dynamics, soil development, and nutrient release under climate change and land management scenarios; provide spatiotemporally resolved hydro-biogeochemical process-understanding to determine whether vast páramo carbon stores will become a source of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere; and finally show how climate-driven glacier retreat triggers responses that propagate throughout mountain catchments to affect water, plants, and elemental cycles. The project’s integrative approach combines field and remote sensing observations, laboratory analyses, and computational modeling, and knowledge co-production with Kichwa communities. In addition to producing extensive multidisciplinary datasets and predictive integrative models in a data-sparse and fast-changing region of the world, centering Indigenous community engagement creates a novel opportunity for Andean Indigenous knowledge to be in dialogue with conventional academic science, which can transform conceptualizations of earth science.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.

在内部热带地区，冰川只在独特的安第斯帕拉莫生态系统上方的火山峰上发现，这些生态系统是全球生物多样性热点，拥有地球上单位面积最高的碳储量，并维持着土著农业Kichwa社区，他们世世代代都在管理土地和沃茨。在气候变化的影响下，那里的冰川正在迅速消失，但绝大多数关于冰川退缩和下游影响的研究都集中在中高纬度地区。该项目与学术、政府和社区机构的厄瓜多尔合作者一起，其总体研究目标是确定气候变化如何推动热带内陆地区文化和生态上至关重要的安第斯火山的冰川退缩，引发对供水、植被和土地利用的影响，以及对气候的元素反馈。为了确保保护区的基切瓦管理者受益，该方法包括与生活在山区基地的历史上被边缘化的基切瓦社区共同制作未来变化的预测模型。与社区的接触将产生一个框架，在伦理上将土著和科学对地球系统的理解编织在一起，这是安第斯山脉所缺乏的。在美国本土机构及其周边地区，该项目将为土著大学理科学生和拉丁美洲/土著高中学生开展活动，帮助他们在承认自己传统的同时，面对科学事业的成就差距。通过合作活动，项目团队作为全球北方对全球变化不成比例的贡献的参与者，努力履行他们对全球南方的土著人民，土地和水的义务，在他们自己的州，并对其他地方的科学-土著社区伙伴关系产生影响。该项目提供了第一个系统调查热带内陆冰川物质平衡过程，模拟冰川消融景观中植物演替加速的后果，并对páramo碳储存的硫和金属控制进行首次评估。它的跨学科工作计划将进一步揭示影响溪流排放时间以及风化和溶质输出的融水隐藏的地下流动路径;展示气候变化和土地管理情景下植物演替、土壤水分动态、土壤发育和养分释放之间的复杂反馈;提供时空分辨的水文地球化学过程，以确定巨大的páramo碳储存是否会成为大气温室气体的来源;最后，展示气候驱动的冰川退缩如何触发在整个山区集水区传播的反应，从而影响水，植物和元素循环。该项目的综合方法结合了实地和遥感观测、实验室分析、计算建模以及与Kichwa社区共同生产知识。除了在世界上数据稀少和快速变化的地区产生广泛的多学科数据集和预测综合模型外，以土著社区参与为中心为安第斯土著知识创造了一个与传统学术科学对话的新机会，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的学术价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。