Cover Sheet for Proposal to the National Science
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COVER SHEET FOR PROPOSAL TO THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT/SOLICITATION NO./CLOSING DATE/if not in response to a program announcement/solicitation enter NSF 10-1 FOR NSF USE ONLY NSF 10-1 NSF PROPOSAL NUMBER FOR CONSIDERATION BY NSF ORGANIZATION UNIT(S) (Indicate the most specific unit known, i.e. program, division, etc.) DEB - Long-Term Ecological Research DATE RECEIVED NUMBER OF COPIES DIVISION ASSIGNED FUND CODE DUNS# (Data Universal Numbering System) FILE LOCATION 615245164 EMPLOYER IDENTIFICATION NUMBER (EIN) OR SHOW PREVIOUS AWARD NO. IF THIS IS IS THIS PROPOSAL BEING SUBMITTED TO ANOTHER FEDERAL TAXPAYER IDENTIFICATION NUMBER (TIN) A RENEWAL AGENCY? YES NO IF YES, LIST ACRONYM(S) AN ACCOMPLISHMENT-BASED RENEWAL 926000147 NAME OF ORGANIZATION TO WHICH AWARD SHOULD BE MADE ADDRESS OF AWARDEE ORGANIZATION, INCLUDING 9 DIGIT ZIP CODE Adm Svcs Ctr Rm 109 University of Alaska Fairbanks Campus 3295 College Road AWARDEE ORGANIZATION CODE (IF KNOWN) Fairbanks, AK 99709-3705 0010637000 NAME OF PERFORMING ORGANIZATION, IF DIFFERENT FROM ABOVE ADDRESS OF PERFORMING ORGANIZATION, IF DIFFERENT, INCLUDING 9 DIGIT ZIP CODE PERFORMING ORGANIZATION CODE (IF KNOWN) IS AWARDEE ORGANIZATION (Check All That Apply) SMALL BUSINESS MINORITY BUSINESS IF THIS IS A PRELIMINARY PROPOSAL (See GPG II.C For Definitions) FOR-PROFIT ORGANIZATION WOMAN-OWNED BUSINESS THEN CHECK HERE TITLE OF PROPOSED PROJECT Regional consequences of changing climate-disturbance interactions for the resilience of Alaska’s boreal forest REQUESTED AMOUNT PROPOSED DURATION (1-60 MONTHS) REQUESTED STARTING DATE SHOW RELATED PRELIMINARY PROPOSAL NO. IF APPLICABLE $ 5,640,000 72 months 12/01/10 CHECK APPROPRIATE BOX(ES) IF THIS PROPOSAL INCLUDES ANY OF THE ITEMS LISTED BELOW BEGINNING INVESTIGATOR (GPG I.G.2) HUMAN SUBJECTS (GPG II.D.7) Human Subjects Assurance Number DISCLOSURE OF LOBBYING ACTIVITIES (GPG II.C.1.e) Exemption Subsection or IRB App. Date PROPRIETARY & PRIVILEGED INFORMATION (GPG I.D, II.C.1.d) INTERNATIONAL COOPERATIVE ACTIVITIES: COUNTRY/COUNTRIES INVOLVED HISTORIC PLACES (GPG II.C.2.j) (GPG II.C.2.j) EAGER* (GPG II.D.2) RAPID** (GPG II.D.1) VERTEBRATE ANIMALS (GPG II.D.6) IACUC App. Date HIGH RESOLUTION GRAPHICS/OTHER GRAPHICS WHERE EXACT COLOR PHS Animal Welfare Assurance Number REPRESENTATION IS REQUIRED FOR PROPER INTERPRETATION (GPG I.G.1) PI/PD DEPARTMENT PI/PD POSTAL ADDRESS Institute of Arctic Biology PI/PD FAX NUMBER Fairbanks, AK 997750180 907-474-6967 United States NAMES (TYPED) High Degree Yr of Degree Telephone Number Electronic Mail Address PI/PD NAME Roger W Ruess PhD 1980 907-474-7153 [email protected] CO-PI/PD Thomas A Hanley PhD 1980 907-723-1506 [email protected] CO-PI/PD Jeremy B Jones PhD 1994 907-474-7972 [email protected] CO-PI/PD Michelle C Mack PhD 1998 352-846-2510 [email protected] CO-PI/PD A. David McGuire Ph.D. 1989 907-474-6242 [email protected] Page 1 of 2 Regional Consequences of Changing Climate-Disturbance Interactions for the Resilience of Alaska's Boreal Forest Project Summary The Alaskan boreal forest has remained highly resilient to climate fluctuations since black spruce spread to dominate the region approximately 6,000 years ago; however, evidence is mounting that rapid climate change over the past century has altered the interrelationships among physical, biological and social drivers to influence the regional system. BNZ LTER research has identified key feedbacks that maintain resilience within boreal forests. Climate-driven changes in disturbance regimes have the potential to disrupt these feedbacks and result in regime shifts in successional pathways and landscape structure and function throughout interior Alaska. Changes in key sources of ecological resilience may lead to threshold responses of important variables and processes and thus change landscape structure and heterogeneity. These changes also have important consequences for ecosystem services to Alaskan Native communities, which are particularly vulnerable to the combination of climatic, ecological, and social-economic change given their high cost of living and reliance on the land for food. The intellectual merit of the proposed research derives from our program to understand the interactive effects of changing climate and disturbance regimes on the Alaska boreal forest, and study associated consequences for regional feedbacks to the climate system, and sustainability of subsistence Alaskan communities. Our research program focuses on social-ecological resilience and response to change by integrating four components. (1) Studying past and current direct effects of climate change on ecosystems and key disturbance regimes (fire, permafrost thaw, insect/pathogen outbreaks) at local and regional scales; (2) understanding mechanisms and consequences for how climate-disturbance interactions drive changes in ecosystems and landscape structure and heterogeneity; (3) modeling the effects of interactions among changes in climate, ecosystem structure and function, and disturbance regimes on regional ecosystem dynamics and climate feedbacks (forest-atmosphere exchanges of trace gases, water, and energy); and (4) studying how climate variability and change are affecting the coupled social-ecological dynamics of rural Alaskan villages by understanding how changes in ecosystem services are affecting community resilience and helping to identify opportunities for adaptation and/or transformation of community practices. The research design combines long-term observations, long-term experiments, dendrochronological studies, and on-going and new process studies to understand the ecological feedbacks contributing to resilience and the underlying mechanisms for vegetation and landscape change in floodplains, uplands, wetlands and boreal (sub-arctic) tundra. Plot-level studies are extended to larger spatial scales (watersheds, interior Alaska, pan-boreal region) in a hierarchical research design using extensive measurements, remote sensing and modeling. Temporal scales of research span hours (weather), years (growth, population dynamics), decades (monitoring, experiments, and stand-age reconstructions), and centuries (vegetation and climate reconstructions). We establish a new network of long-term BNZ LTER research sites to regionalize our research on resilience and mechanisms of ecosystem responses to changes in climate and disturbance regimes in black spruce forests. Broader impacts include our Schoolyard LTER program, which is actively involved in environmental science training of K-12 students and educators throughout the state of Alaska, and participates in a program to bring rural Alaskan students to Fairbanks during the summer to be mentored by BNZ LTER scientists. We also actively engage undergraduates and graduate students in research and K-12 education, and are involved with a number of Network-wide educational programs. To make information available and useful to the broader community, we interact with local artists and scientists, collaborate closely with numerous state and federal agencies and Native organizations through joint research programs, workshops and meetings, and convene the BNZ LTER Community Resilience Working Group composed of village leaders who meet annually to review BNZ LTER research findings and discuss opportunities for community adaptation and transformation. Involvement in LTER cross-site comparisons enables us to study and understand the boreal forest in a broader social-ecological context. Information management emphasizes secure archival of data, promotion of its use in synthesis, and development of web-based databases to facilitate access to and use of data by the scientific community. 1 Section 1: Prior Results High-latitude amplification of 20th century global warming has caused Alaska’s boreal forest to warm twice as rapidly as the global average (77, 101). Mean annual air temperature in interior Alaska increased by 1.3˚C during the past 50 years (73, 191) and is projected to increase by an additional 3-7˚C by the end of the 21st century (http://www.snap.uaf.edu). Precipitation has increased by only 1.4 mm decade-1 over this same period (78). Its projected continued increase will likely be insufficient to offset increased summer evapotranspiration, leading to potentially drier soils and lower lake levels. In response to a gradual Holocene cooling and moistening of climate, black spruce (Picea mariana) and its associated fire regime assumed regional dominance in Interior Alaska 5,000-7,000 years ago, producing a landscape mosaic similar to that of today (54, 82, 128). This boreal system has persisted relatively unchanged within the detection capabilities of paleoecological indicators since that time, despite substantial climatic fluctuations such as the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age (75, 84, 202). The boreal forest has thus exhibited substantial resilience to past changes in climate. However, warming since the 1950s appears to be unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years (9, 112, 160). In the 6 years of our most recent LTER grant cycle we have experienced the largest fire event (109) and second largest flood on record and unprecedented outbreaks of forest insects (213, 222) and pathogens (179), providing opportunities to study both gradual change and abrupt shocks to the system. This summary of prior results builds on four recent synthesis efforts of the Bonanza Creek (BNZ) LTER: the publication of our LTER synthesis volume (36), a circum-arctic analysis of climate-disturbance interactions in