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.
Freshwater bodies – "inland waters" – come in many shapes and sizes: large rivers like the Mississippi, creeks, lakes, ponds, reservoirs, wetlands. These environments are critically important for human well being, including health, economic activity and recreation. They are also rich and complex ecosystems that connect land, oceans and air via the water they transport, often over long distances, and the materials and organisms carried and transformed by them; these materials include gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide, dissolved constituents like salts and nutrients, and sediment particles eroded on land. Water quality is the net outcome of these geochemical, physical, and biological processes, and human activities such as pollution emissions, ecosystem alterations and climate change. The wide range of ecosystem types, processes, and human concerns related to water quality and composition has resulted in a diversity of overlapping scientific disciplines (hydrology, ecology, limnology, geomorphology, etc.) and management concerns studying these systems from different perspectives, often in relative isolation from one another. The outcomes of studies and monitoring of aquatic environments are widely dispersed, hampering the development of interdisciplinary perspectives, assessments of change over time, and predictive understanding. While studies of terrestrial and marine ecosystems are increasingly informed by interdisciplinary, modern observation, modeling and analysis capabilities, from satellites to large databases and global models, the science of inland waters remains highly fragmented, and data and models are often limited or not readily found. This project, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) "EarthCube" initiative, brought together a group of geoscientists, ecologists, and computing experts in a 2.5 day workshop in April 2013 to address this fragmentation of fields pertaining to the quality and composition of inland waters, from the perspective of the opportunities offered by modern capabilities in computing and data collection, management and analysis. The meeting produced a common vision of key scientific questions, and of challenges and opportunities for leveraging computational and information-management capabilities to advance the interdisciplinary understanding and management of inland waters. It also resulted in follow-up scientific gatherings and discussions at conferences, including the Joint Aquatic Sciences Meeting in May 2014, and ongoing engagement from workshop leads and participants in the broader NSF EarthCube program for computational and information management advances in the geosciences.
