The Hawaii EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement award will build on the success of the first EPSCoR RII program to advance specific research opportunities in ecology, evolution and Cyberinfrastructure that are of high priority to the State and the UH System. Specifically, Hawaii's 2005 RII Plan presents a research agenda that promotes responsible stewardship of Hawaii's ecosystems while enabling its people to assume their roles as technologically literate, critically thinking citizens in a 21st century workforce. In partnership with the State Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism (DBEDT), UH will leverage IMUA II to promote what Governor Lingle has emphasized as an "opportunity for environmental responsibility to be an economic force" for the State. The overarching theme of this award is "Research Collaborations in Island Ecology, Evolution and Cyberinfrastructure".
The Hawaiian Islands are renowned as ideal settings for evolution and speciation studies and provides an exceptional natural laboratory for investigating the ecological and genetic factors underlying speciation and adaptation to diverse natural and altered habitats. Moreover, because the geological evolution of the main islands is well documented, is possible to accurately date genetic divergence times with known geologic events. There is no other place on earth where this can be done as easily or comprehensively. On a different scale, understanding the functioning of ecosystems, interactions of species within them, and the links among terrestrial, aquatic, and marine systems in both intact and altered ecosystems is critical for sustaining the long-term health of Hawaii's environment. Hawaii offers unprecedented opportunities for comparative ecological studies in terrestrial, aquatic, and marine systems at many levels of disturbance and human activities.
This award will expand on the base created by the first RII award by combining Cyberinfrastructure and environmental sensor technology with evolutionary genetics and ecosystem research. Regional partnerships of scientists from Hawaii universities, mainland universities and business leaders in Hawaii will develop infrastructure and appropriate research programs ranging from analyses of evolutionary and ecological processes in diverse habitats and across the Hawaiian archipelago to the multidisciplinary problems of invasive species and ecological and environmental perturbations on urban and rural environments. Other partnerships will be developed with national centers of excellence (National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the Center for Embedded Networked Sensoring). The Cyberinfrastructure focus area will develop an innovative network for environmental research and education that serves as an integrator of the EPSCoR program. This is based on a) wireless sensor networks and interactive data systems & repositories for environmental monitoring, and 2) Hawaiian socioecological systems research sites and collaboration. The Cyberinfrastructure program will collaborate with InteleSense Technologies, the National Biocomputation Center at Stanford University, the Maui High Performance Computing Center, and UCLA's Center for Embedded Networked Sensors.
From an ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic perspective, Hawaii's population base is among the most diverse in the nation. The award develops a program that builds on the most promising recruitment and retention activities implemented under the current RII award to develop structured interdisciplinary courses as a means of integrating interdisciplinary environmentally-focused research into the curriculum and to increase STEM student performance, especially for underrepresented groups. A major goal is to embrace the community colleges in the program by making community college faculty members of the research teams and to facilitate incorporation of research programs into the community college curricula.
