This Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) project will integrate multiple sustainability research efforts in the western hemisphere by examining climate-driven risks to freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide. The connection between climate variation and threats to ecosystem services is poorly understood and difficult to assess because it depends on regional climate responses to global climate change. The value of ecosystems services varies locally and regionally with varying human needs and cultural settings. Hence, assessing (and mitigating) these threats to tightly coupled natural-human system requires a multidisciplinary approach addressing scientific, socioeconomic and cultural aspects. In this project, researchers from the U.S. will team with complementary investigators from Canada, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, and future participating nations globally. The goal of this SAVI is to enable all these researchers to expand their geographical and socioeconomic coverage to better assess climate- and human-forced risks to freshwater ecosystems and services, and to develop adaptation strategies. The project will achieve this goal by (1) Developing and implementing a standardized environmental cyberinfrastructure (technology for data acquisition, management, and collaborative analysis) to employ freshwater ecosystems globally as sentinels of climate variability and risk to services (particularly in previously unobserved settings in Central and South America); (2) Investigating watershed and ecosystem interactions with multiple stressors to assess risks to ecosystem services across geophysical, socioeconomic, and cultural gradients; (3) Enhancing international collaboration between the U.S., Canada and Latin American nations in developing transferrable strategies for stakeholder engagement to determine management and mitigation strategies which are both technically and economically feasible, as well as culturally acceptable; and (4) Integrating our graduate student training and subsequent doctoral research to train the next generation of internationally engaged, inter-disciplinary aquatic ecosystems researchers who will attack scientific challenges of importance to society.
Humans benefit from resources and processes supplied by freshwater ecosystems, including streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands. This work will study how these benefits, which are referred to as ecosystem services, are expected to change with changing climate. Ecosystem services can be grouped into four broad categories: provisioning (drinking water or hydropower for example), regulating (such as modulating climate, controlling disease), supporting (such as distributing sediments and nutrients), and cultural (such as recreational benefits). The project will unite engineers, earth scientists, biologists and social scientists in an effort aimed at understanding how quickly and how severely climate changes will affect aquatic ecosystems in different places. At the same time, the investigators will identify suitable strategies for people to reduce the impact of these changes by adapting practices locally or regionally. People living in different places value ecosystems services differently. For example, people living in a large city may value drinking water or the quality of a fishery differently than people living on a lake. Part of this project will focus on identifying successful adaptation strategies within different cultures and socioeconomic settings and communicating these strategies to relevant stakeholders. Lastly, the project will continuously involve undergraduate and graduate students in its research and stakeholder outreach activities in order to better prepare them to address the challenges ahead for our global well-being.
This award is designated as a Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) award and is being co-funded by NSF?s Office of International and Integrative Activities.
