An award is made to the University of Minnesota to acquire an Enhanced Climate Change Simulator, a unique instrument that simultaneously creates and measures future conditions outdoors in central Minnesota grassland, without chambers or enclosures, with the specific objective of simulating the atmospheric chemistry (CO2 concentration, atmospheric N deposition) and climate (temperature and rainfall) of the future, and monitoring a set of ecosystem responses. The Simulator includes equipment that modifies CO2, temperature and rainfall; and ancillary equipment to monitor and control those environmental variables, and to monitor abiotic and biotic (vegetation and soil organisms) responses of the ecosystem to the climate simulation. The Simulator will contribute to comprehensive research training for University of Minnesota students and postdocs, serve as a research platform for a wide array of collaborative and cooperative researchers at University of Minnesota and at other institutions, provide STEM education and training to primary, secondary and post-secondary students and educators, and provide public outreach through multiple media.
The Simulator will contribute to important societally relevant scientific research. Only a handful of climate change simulators with similar capabilities exist around the world, and none controls as many aspects of future climate, nor has as long a continuous record of ecosystem response. Notably, the simulator will uniquely enable hypothesis testing about interactive effects of multiple global change factors on grassland ecosystems. Such interactive effects remain one of the biggest gaps in understanding that hinder predictions of whether terrestrial ecosystems will be resilient in the face of multiple global changes and whether their responses to global change will slow or accelerate the pace of climate change.
