SAVI: Crossing the Boundaries of Critical Zone Science with a Virtual Institute

预计未来20年，人口将增加到80亿以上，对食物和燃料的需求将增加50%，对清洁水的需求将增加30%。为了实现这一点，人类必须增加对发生在关键区域(CZ)中的物理、生物和化学过程的了解，这些过程在全球范围内孕育着人类社会。CZ是位于植被冠层顶部和地下水底部之间的地球表层。这种认识将有助于社会更好地适应和管理与持续的土地利用和气候变化相关的影响。该提案建议建立一个国际临界带天文台(CZO)SAVI，作为全球地球表面地球科学研究的一项综合活动。该提案的目的是解决挑战美国CZO计划的重要和悬而未决的指控：单个站点如何清楚地表达和回答网络范围的问题？不同的CZO如何在所有CZO上以协调的方式进行一些测量？支持者假设，这种衡量和问题的发展需要有重点的领导和协调一致的努力，这需要5年的研讨会、研究生指导和需要共同衡量的有针对性的研究项目。他们提出了一种发展国际交叉CZO科学的方法，并通过研究生和博士后培训建立一支真正跨学科和国际化的新骨干科学家队伍。CZO SAVI将建立一个框架，以应对人类在CZ宜居性方面面临的重大挑战。该项目将通过以下方式吸引来自不同网络的美国和国际合作伙伴：1)学习探索和测量支撑CZ模型的基本变量；2)支持一个美国初级科学家小组成为CZ的下一代国际学者。简而言之，该项目旨在实施一个由初级研究人员组成的交叉和耦合网络，与CZO的高级领导人密切合作，以促进对CZO过程的跨学科和耦合性质的理解。这被指定为跨虚拟机构(SAVI)科学奖，由美国国家科学基金会地球科学委员会、生物科学委员会和国际与综合活动办公室共同资助。

An anticipated increase in population to more than 8 billion, a 50% increase in demand for food and fuel, and a 30% increase in demand for clean water will occur in the next 2 decades. To enable this, humanity must increase our understanding of the physical, biological and chemical processes occurring in the Critical Zone (CZ) that nurture human society globally. The CZ is Earth's surface layer between the top of the vegetation canopy and the base of groundwater. Such understanding will help society to better adapt to and manage the effects associated with ongoing land-use and climate change. This proposal proposes to create an international Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) SAVI as an integrating activity for Earth surface geosciences research worldwide.The aim of this proposal is to address important and outstanding charges that challenge the U.S. CZO program: How can individual sites articulate and answer network-wide questions? How can the diverse CZOs make some measurements in a coordinated fashion at all CZOs? Proponents hypothesize that development of such measurements and questions requires focused leadership and a concerted effort that entails 5 years of workshops, graduate and postgraduate student mentoring, and targeted research projects that demand common measurements. They have proposed an approach to the development of international cross-CZO science, and to establish a new cadre of truly interdisciplinary and international scientists through graduate student and postdoctoral training. This CZO SAVI will establish a framework to address major challenges that face humanity with respect to habitability of the CZ. This project will engage U.S. and international partners from diverse networks by: 1) learning to explore and measure the essential variables underpinning models of the CZ; and, 2) supporting a U.S. group of junior scientists to become the next-generation of international scholars of the CZ. In short, the project seeks to implement a cross cutting and coupled network of junior researchers working closely with the senior CZO leaders to promote understanding of the cross-disciplinary and coupled nature of CZ processes. This is designated as a Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) award and is co-funded by NSF's Geosciences Directorate, Biological Sciences Directorate and the Office of International and Integrative Activities.