CAREER: Fire impacts on forest carbon recovery in a warming world: training the next generation of Earth analysts by exploring a missing scale of observations

野火的数量和范围正在增加美国西部的森林。这些森林在调节大气中的碳含量方面很重要。自20世纪80年代以来，野火使美国西部森林的碳积累量减少了15倍。这个职业奖将探讨关键问题：随着区域变暖和随之而来的野火干扰规模的增加，烧毁森林的碳回收是否会发生变化。利用无人机系统（UAS）、氖的空中观测站和GEDI卫星进行的创新性遥感技术将能够以极高的分辨率对数千公顷的森林结构进行快速监测，从而提供一种关键的、经常缺失的观测尺度。有了这些遥感数据和其他进步，区域到大陆尺度的生态学现在可以在非常精细的尺度上探索大面积。然而，在充分利用这一新技术方面存在重大障碍。实际利用这场数据革命的培训远远落后于数据可用性。这个职业奖将通过培训下一代地球分析师的数据和计算密集型科学，尖端的生态系统碳测量技术和大型团队合作来满足这一需求。该奖项将促进对地上生物量恢复轨迹如何作为火灾规模和严重程度，干旱和针叶林类型的函数而变化的基本理解这项研究将：1）应用新兴的UAS技术和方法来估计树木水平的地上生物量，然后探索氖南落基山脉域火灾后的碳回收; 2）利用空间观测，探索美国西部针叶林火灾历史时序中碳恢复干扰后的基本驱动因素; 3）建立一个由100多名生态系统科学家组成的国家网络，主要是研究生，世界卫生组织将能够针对氖领域内的干扰对森林碳动态进行数据密集型探索。教育工作包括在五所大学同时教授的分布式研究生研讨会，在地球实验室的地球数据科学学习门户网站上提供的开放式教育模块，目前已有数万名用户，以及森林碳代码，将围绕关键方法的进步，数据编码挑战和云计算工作流程建立合作努力。总的来说，这个职业奖将有助于更好地了解森林在不断变化的火灾制度下何时从碳汇转变为碳源，并有助于培养下一代有数据能力的地球科学家。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

The number and extent of wildfires are increasing the western U.S. forests. These forests are important in regulating the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Wildfires have reduced the amount of carbon western U.S. forests accumulate by 15-fold since the 1980s. This CAREER award will explore the critical question: is carbon recovery in burned forests changing as regional warming and consequent wildfire disturbance size increase. Innovative remote sensing using Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), NEON's Airborne Observatory, and the GEDI satellite will allow rapid monitoring of forest structure at very high resolution across thousands of hectares-providing a critical and often missing scale of observations. With these remote sensing data and other advances, regional to continental scale ecology can now explore large areas at very fine scales. However major impediments exist in taking full advantage of this new technology. Training to actually harness this data revolution significantly lags behind the data availability. This CAREER award will address this need through training the next generation of Earth analysts in data and compute-intensive science, cutting-edge ecosystem carbon measuring techniques, and large-team collaboration. This award will advance fundamental understanding of how aboveground biomass recovery trajectories vary as a function of fire size and severity, drought, and conifer forest type (1984-present) across the western U.S. This research will: 1) apply emerging UAS technologies and methods to estimate tree-level aboveground biomass to then explore carbon recovery post-fire in the NEON southern Rockies domain; 2) explore fundamental drivers of carbon recovery post-disturbance across a chronosequence of fire history in conifer forests of the western U.S. using space-based observations; and 3) build a national network of over 100 ecosystem scientists, predominantly graduate students, who will be enabled to conduct data-intensive exploration of forest carbon dynamics in response to disturbance within NEON domains. Education efforts include a distributed graduate seminar taught simultaneously at five universities, open education modules delivered on Earth Lab's learning portal for Earth data science that currently reaches tens of thousands of users, and a Forest Carbon Codefest that will build collaborative efforts around key methodological advances, data coding challenges, and cloud-compute workflows. Overall this CAREER award will lead to better understanding of when forests shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources under changing fire regimes and help to train the next generation of data-capable Earth scientists.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.