Continental surface waters represent distinct environments that are hot spots of biogeochemical storage and transformation, as well as conduits for large-scale material transport to the oceans and atmosphere. These systems are integral components of global geochemical cycles, are intertwined with human health and economic activity, and are highly sensitive to anthropogenic impacts. Without data from a wide variety of disciplines, such as organic and physical chemistry, ecosystem science, sedimentology, landscape evolution, water-rock interaction, and element and material cycles (weathering products, trace elements, carbon burial, nutrient fluxes, mineral particles, etc.), it is not possible to realistically model these important surface water systems and understand the complex interactions between their various physical and biological components. Data necessary to populate such models comes from field-based, experimental, laboratory, and theoretical work, involving short research projects, long-term research observatories, and water quality monitoring systems. The goal of this workshop is to surface requirements in the fields of river and fresh water biogeochemical studies for a major new NSF data and knowledge management initiative (i.e., EarthCube) that is dedicated to revolutionizing geoscience by providing easy access to, discovery of, and visualization of data from across the geo- and environmental sciences. This workshop will bring together ~60 geoscientists from across the US who come from relevant disciplines, including cyber/computer science experts, this coallition of parties will have a job to collectively define future science goals in this important arena. It will also be used to identify the most critical, widespread needs shared by those working on surface water and fresh water biogeochemical problems and to guide the development of NSF EarthCube cyberinfrastructure for this community. The workshop will also focus on strategies that help scientists and data that they need to cross sub-discipline barriers. Discussions will encompass all aspects of experimental, in-situ, geospatial, and modeling data as well as address issues related to quantitative analytical and scaling approaches that enable the integration of observations. Workshop participants will also address topics such as process rates along flow paths ranging from short scales such as sediment-water interfaces, to continental-scale basins. Progress addressing these needs in a coordinated fashion across sub-disciplines has the potential to lead to transformative advancements in this dispersed but critical intersection of research communities. Broader impacts of the work center primarily on building infrastructure for science.
Below the outcome of a 2.5days workshop that was organized in 2013 to determine the cyberinfrastructure needs of the Inland Water geosciences community: A 2.5-day workshop was organized that brought together a diverse group of 55 participants last April 24-26th 2013, Boulder CO. The workshop provided a platform for a community of aquatic scientists who have common ground and overlapping interests in their study of inland waters (bio)geochemistry and fluvial sediment fluxes, but may communicate rarely due to disciplinary fragmentation or regionally specific interests. An executive summary report is submitted, providing major meeting results and outcomes A one page document presenting the major outcome of the workshop including the 3 grant challenges the community provided. This one page document is included in the combined EarthCube end-users document "EarthCube End-User Workshops: Executive Summaries". Inland Water representatives attended several EarthCube meetings to represent the Inland Water community: EarthCube Scope and Vision workshop, March 25 – 26th, 2015. EarthCube End User and Professional Societies Assembly Workshop, March 18-20th, 2014. EarthCube All Hands Meeting, June 23-26th, 2014. Submitted a RCN proposal (rejected) to further develop support for the Inland Water Community The workshop participants identified three prototype initiatives that exemplify the challenges the broader community faces when attempting to (re)discover and access the data needed to address complex, cross-disciplinary problems, and would motivate transformational science by integrating formerly unrelated data sources: 1) H2O (‘Headwater-to-Ocean’ Data Access and Visualization). The complexities of data on the constituents rivers transport from their headwaters to the coastal ocean, and the diversity of the fields and disciplines involved in generating them, limit the understanding of the interaction the hydrologic cycle has with Earth’s surface. Our goal is to develop portal infrastructure to easily share, archive and access in-situ, remotely sensed, modeled and watershed information on river systems, starting with Earth’s largest rivers; and visualization and analytical tools to enhance their utility. This will enable better quantification of fluxes, refine understanding of their drivers over different spatial and temporal scales, allow their current status and historical trends to be assessed, and support models that can be used to elucidate future changes under different disturbance scenarios. 2) IMENSO (‘IMpact of ENSO’). The effect El Niño-Southern Oscillation has on climate in regions outside the tropical Pacific is well documented, as is its global impact on mean river discharge. However, ENSO’s effect on the hydrological extreme events that trigger natural disasters is still poorly understood, and the related spatiotemporal patterns of variability in sediment, carbon and nutrient fluxes are only just beginning to be explored through observations. Our goal is to create a shared knowledge base that can be used to assess the magnitude of the impact ENSO-driven climate variability exerts on the riverine fluxes of water, sediment, carbon, nutrients and weathering products across the world, and will function as a baseline for quantifying the effect caused by future shifts in the background state. 3) GBC ('Global Biogeochemical Cycles'). The last decade saw a growing recognition of the importance of inland waters in global biogeochemical cycles. However, spatially resolved quantification of fluxes (lateral fluxes, gas evasion and continental burial) remains limited and poorly constrained. Our goal is to compile and integrate global river time series observations for water, sediments, carbon and nitrogen, together with geospatial drivers and hydrographic data sets, to enable data and model-driven quantification of contemporary and past fluxes. This will result in greatly enhanced understanding of the continental and global role of inland waters in earth-system biogeochemical cycles, and capacity to model biogeochemical responses to scenarios of future human impacts.
