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

在内陆热带地区，冰川只存在于独特的安第斯páramo生态系统之上的火山山峰上，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上最高的碳储量，并维持着土著农业Kichwa社区，他们世世代代管理着土地和水域。在气候变化的影响下，那里的冰川正在快速消失，但绝大多数关于冰川退缩及其下游影响的研究都集中在中高纬度地区。与厄瓜多尔的学术、政府和社区机构合作，该项目的总体研究目标是确定气候变化如何推动安第斯火山在热带内陆的文化和生态至关重要的冰川退缩，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páramos的Kichwa管理人员的利益，该方法包括与生活在山区基地的历史上被边缘化的Kichwa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伦理框架，将土著和对地球系统的科学理解结合起来——这在安第斯山脉是缺乏的。在离家更近的地方，在美国的家庭机构内和周围，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，帮助他们面对科学事业的成就差距，同时承认他们的传统。通过合作活动，作为全球北方对全球变化做出巨大贡献的参与者，项目团队努力履行其对全球南方及其国家的土著人民、土地和水的义务，并对其他地方的科学-土著社区伙伴关系产生影响。该项目首次对热带内陆地区的冰川质量平衡过程进行了系统研究，模拟了冰川消融景观中加速植物演替的后果，并首次评估了硫和金属对páramo碳储量的控制。其跨学科的工作计划将进一步揭示隐藏的地下流动路径的融水，影响时间的河流排放和风化和出口的溶质；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；提供时空解析的水文-生物地球化学过程，以确定巨大的páramo碳储量是否会成为大气温室气体的来源；最后展示了气候驱动的冰川退缩是如何引发反应的，这些反应在整个山区集水区传播，影响水、植物和元素循环。该项目的综合方法包括实地和遥感观测、实验室分析、计算建模以及与Kichwa社区的知识合作。除了在世界上数据稀疏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，为安第斯土著知识与传统学术科学对话创造了一个新的机会，这可以改变地球科学的概念。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。

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.