Nancy B. Grimm, PhD - US grants

This project will describe the spatial and temporal patterns of trophic structure and the proportion of total biomass in primary producer, primary consumer, and secondary consumer trophic levels in a desert stream ecosystem. The spatial context for this description will be a hierarchical arrangement of patches from the relatively small scale of algal or macrophyte assemblages to large scale run-riffle-pool habitats. Temporal change will be assessed along successional trajectories associated with flooding and drying. Losses and gains of biomass at each trophic level will be evaluated both within and between patches to determine how patches are linked. Experiments will identify mechanisms shaping trophic structure and causing observed temporal changes in trophic structure. Mesocosm experiments will manipulate resources and consumers in 3-level systems, and a natural stream experiment will manipulate nutrients and top predators. Descriptive and experimental results will be used to evaluate ecosystem-level consequences of specific trophic configurations; this evaluation will indicate whether change in community-level properties drives change in ecosystem structure and function. This research explores questions concerned with the relative influence of top-down (propagated from the top to the bottom of the food chain) and bottom-up (propagated from the base) processes in determining patterns observed in nature. These are important issues concerned with the responses of ecological systems to disturbance. The facilities for this research are excellent; the investigators are productive and innovative experts in the area of stream ecology.

A research group at Arizona State University proposes to purchase an element/isotope analysis system for use in environmental biology. Environmental biology is a critical area for development because of a rapidly expanding population and associated environmental stress in the Southwest. The proposed instrumentation will support studies of subjects such as: stream- riparian and lake-ecosystems, focusing on nutrient cycling and transformation; comparative physiology research on insect nitrogen excretion; and host nutritional quality and reproductive success in natural populations of cactophilic flies. The University will support this endeavor by providing a technician dedicated to the laboratory, space and necessary improvements in the space, maintenance costs, and cost-sharing on capital purchases. The projects are all characterized by substantial involvement of student researchers (graduates and undergraduate). This instrumentation will allow a significant improvement in training of these students.

9317340 Grimm

This proposal is submitted under a special pilot program, Undergraduate Mentorships in Environmental Biology. The four year program will offer undergraduate students first hand experience in carrying out ecological research under the mentorships of six active research ecologists. We will aggressively seek to involve groups traditionally under represented in environmental biology, includi ng trainees of Latino, American Indian, and African American backgrounds as well as a number of non minority students. This effort will be aided considerably by close coordination with existing programs that target these minority groups at ASU. The program is a specialized educational track consisting of an integrative first year seminar, early exposure to advanced courses, research involvement at the outset of students' college careers, and continued follow up and support of individual students as they make plans for graduate school and future careers. Careful documentation of the program's successes and failures, support from other research experience programs targeting more advanced undergraduate students, and placement of students in individual laboratories will facilitate the entry of alumni and alumnae of this program into research careers in environmental biology.

9306909 Fisher This research will determine the effect of spatial configuration on nutrient retention in stream-riparian ecosystems. Streams are complex, heterogeneous systems consisting of a wetted channel, saturated sediments below and adjacent to the wetted channel, and a strip of terrestrial vegetation (the riparian zone) at each lateral edge. The extent and shape of each of these varies greatly in space and time. As water flows downstream, it moves to varying degrees among these components. Because of several favorable properties, streams of arid lands will be used as model systems for this study. The overall goal of this project is to determine how configuration affects the extent to which materials transported in this water are retained and recycled within a given reach. This goal will be met by addressing four questions around which the research is organized. First, how does spatial pattern influence nutrient retention? Spatial configuration and its effects will initially be considered for a single point in time. This will be accomplished by mapping the stream ecosystem a two scales to determine its physical configuration, describing hydrologic connections among these elements, and the consequences of flow path for retention of nutrients. Configuration will be manipulated experimentally to determine the effect of different patterns on the retention process. Second, how does disturbance affect this relationship? Several individual flash flood and drought events will be studied in terms of their effect on configuration and recovery of system function between events. Third, how do configuration and function interact over large spatial and temporal scales? This analysis will involve scaling up reach-scale processes to include geomorphic variation generated by valley floor width. Temporal scaling will be accomplished by considering the effect of variable flood and drought regimes; their frequency , intensity, and distribution in time. Fourth, how general are results derived from North American desert streams for this ecosystem type worldwide? This question will be answered with a comparative study of the pattern-process relationship among streams of similar deserts in Australia and Spain. %%% This research is significant in that it will contribute to basic scientific understanding of how pattern and process interact in complex ecosystems. It is an advance over black box, well-mixed reactor models that have been commonly used in ecosystem ecology. Research results will be useful to applied ecology as well. Streams are open systems which link terrestrial uplands with downstream reservoirs, groundwater supplies, or estuaries. Retention and transformation of stream load in transit affects the quality of water delivered to recipient systems. Riparian and other wetland ecosystems are increasingly used for this "nutrient filtration" capacity. Results of this research will aid in understanding this process in natural streams and optimizing it in managed and human-designed systems. ***

Grimm 9714833 This project is a long-term study of the Phoenix metropolitan area and fringing regions of central Arizona into which Phoenix is rapidly expanding. Objectives of this LTER program are to: 1) generate and test general ecological theory in an urban environment, 2) enhance understanding of the ecology of cities, 3) identify feedbacks between ecological and socio-economic factors, and 4) involve K-12 students in the enterprise of scientific discovery. Phoenix is one of the largest and most rapidly growing cities of the arid and semi-arid American west. Because Phoenix is young, urban redevelopment is minor compared to expansive growth of the city's edges, where agricultural lands and natural desert habitats are being rapidly converted to suburbia. Historic patterns of growth will be reconstructed using maps, planning documents, aerial photographs and satellite imagery to generate a GIS-based record of urban change. Modeling will be centered on a hierarchical, spatially-explicit, patch-dynamic approach, based on land-use patch types. At intermediate scales, landscape models will be developed to determine configuration effects of multiple patches. A regional simulation model of the entire area will be developed to predict and test ecological consequences of alternative patterns of future development. Patch-specific ecological characteristics will be monitored in five core areas: primary production, natural population and community characteristics, storage and dynamics of organic matter, movement of materials (including water), and patterns of disturbances by redevelopment, fire and flood. A successional model will guide this work; both short-term ecological trends associated with land-use change at the patch scale, and long-term changes as patches mature will be followed. Of special interest is ecological change within a given patch type on the city-center to suburban-edge gradient. Socioeconomic factors are included in this study as feedbacks between land-use decisions and ecol ogical characteristics. That is, how do ecological features shape land-use decisions and how, in return, do ecological consequences modify future land use policy? Research will determine the importance of ecological factors to individual perceptions of quality of life. In addition, objective analyses of change in property values and shifting demographic patterns within the urban landscape will be assessed as an indicator of ecological and other values. These efforts will be enriched by multiple partnerships with agencies and municipalities. This research effort includes a substantial commitment to K-12 education by involving teachers and students as hands-on research partners, through interaction with developing urban science curricula, and by providing a real time electronic interface with research discoveries via the Internet. This component of the project is enhanced by a strong interface with numerous educational partners in the greater Phoenix area.

9800912 Grimm The PIs propose to investigate the effects of spatial structure on nutrient dynamics at different scales in a stream-riparian ecosystem. Streams are heterogeneous ecosystems that transport nutrients from terrestrial uplands to lakes, reservoirs, groundwater aquifers and estuaries. The extent to which nutrients are retained, transported, or transformed depends on the path of water through ecosystem components, or patches, and residence time in each patch. Preliminary results show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, nutrient concentrations in stream water are highly variable in space. The PIs will describe the pattern of nutrient concentrations in stream surface water over a range of spatial scales, identify elements of ecosystem structure and associated processes that might explain these patterns at each scale, and develop a spatial structure-based simulation model to predict nutrient concentrations and nutrient retention as a function of spatial structure. The research will contribute to emerging ecological theory by examining how heterogeneity and the processes that cause it change with scale in a particular ecosystem. It will also aid in stream ecosystem management by increasing our understanding of nutrient dynamics in a desert stream catchment and by providing a simulation model for use in future ecosystem studies.

Abstract 97-27311 Fisher Integrating linkages among aquatic and terrestrial components of arid landscapes This research will address the following puzzle: In the arid Southwest, atmospheric deposition of nitrogen (N) exceeds export by streams and rivers. While measurements suggest a huge (>10-fold) annual storage increment in the catchment and widespread N enrichment of the landscape, the opposite is true - usable N is rare. Both terrestrial and aquatic primary production are N-limited, and N2 fixing organisms abound in both environments. The objective of this project is to identify the hot spots (in space and time) for N transformation and retention and thereby account for the catchment-level N discrepancy. The investigators will focus on methods development for the flowpath approach; experiments in the uplands, tributary system and stream-riparian corridor; and developing an understanding of variance in these systems. The work will concentrate on processes rather than patterns, and is expected to lay the underpinnings for linkages between the empirical work and conceptual and mathematical models now under development.

Abstract


DBI-9983132

McCartney Arizona State

Networking our Research Legacy; Infrastructure to Document, manage, and Access Ecological Data

Summary

This project proposes to develop an information infrastructure that will greatly enhance access to a broad spectrum of ecological data resources at Arizona State University. A suite of existing databases that inventory metadata, taxonomic data, and bibliographies will be cross-referenced and enhanced to support spatial queries and searches via national clearinghouses for geo-spatial, taxonomic and collections data. Through development of a series of tools for automated processing of metadata and data, searches for primary datasets will be able to fluidly direct the user to online preview and query interfaces. These tools will provide several key functions that leverage the power of metadata in automating data access, including simplifying metadata generation, metadata reporting and display, rapid application for data query, and simplifying data import and export over the Internet. The use of open standards such as eXtensible Markup Language and Java and the modular approach to development taken by this project will ensure the flexibility that will allow rapid support for new datasets within the infrastructure and the development of interfaces that address the data needs of diverse target audiences. Prototype applications that illustrate the use of these tools will be developed for three such audiences: academic research, education, and management.

A program is proposed to provide an multifaceted research and educational experience for undergraduate students in environmental biology. The program will attract freshman and sophomore students to experience environmental biology early in their academic careers. A diverse array of environmental biologists will serve as mentors for these students. Students will gain research experience in project ranging from hormonal control of mating behavior to the biogeochemistry of urban environments. Recruiting and retention efforts for this program will be focused on groups that are generally under represented in environmental biology. Participants are expected to include a mixture of Latino, American-Indian, and African-American students. The program will involve careful mentoring not only of students by faculty but by younger students by older students. Careful documentation of student participants will be used to assess and modify the program as a permanent university feature.

9987612
Stuart Fisher - Arizona State University
IGERT: Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training in Urban Ecology

This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in urban ecology. Urban ecology is a relatively new endeavor, thus fellows will have unparalleled opportunity to define the field with a diverse group of faculty members, students, and postdocs. Cities are not only important ecosystems to humans but are excellent laboratories for ecological research. The Central Arizona - Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research project, one of only two urban sites in the NSF's LTER network, provides an established research infrastructure for frontier, multidisciplinary research and graduate training. Training will be built on a collaborative model emphasizing cooperation and teamwork. Fellows may earn degrees in six core departments in the life, earth, and social sciences and will participate in team research, courses, and seminars that emphasize integration among disciplines. Dissertations will be integrative and multidisciplinary and will include a substantial collaborative component beyond the student's home discipline. Collectively, these activities will afford skills that should be broadly applicable to careers in public and private sectors and in academia. The main objective of the program is to educate a new kind of scientist who is broader, more flexible, more collaborative, and more adept at linking science and social issues than heretofore.

IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the third year of the program, awards are being made to nineteen institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Biological Sciences, Geosciences, and Education and Human Resources.

CAP-2 proposes to extend long-term study of central Arizona and metropolitan Phoenix, a desert region supporting agricultural and urban/suburban land uses while undergoing rapid urbanization and population growth. CAP studies human drivers and feedbacks of ecological change. Previous work concentrated on the central themes of urbanization patterns and processes altering the city's ecological conditions and surrounding environment, and ecological feedback-social system interactions. CAP-2 reorganizes the program into five new Integrative Project Areas (IPAs) to aid in the explicit inclusion of socioeconomic drivers and feedbacks: 1) land-use and land-cover change, 2) climate and ecosystem dynamics, 3) water policy, use and supply, 4) material flux and socio-ecosystem response, and 5) human control of biodiversity. The modus operandi for long-term monitoring, experiments, information management, site management, network participation and education/outreach was established during CAP-1 pilot projects. Projects continued into CAP-2 include: long-term monitoring at 200 sites across CAP; historical analyses of land use; classification of land cover; documentation of change in land cover and use; river monitoring above and below the city; and establishment of intensive sites for in-depth climatic, ecological, and social surveys and experiments. Three long-term experiments will be continued and a fourth initiated (a long-term factorial N+P fertilization along a deposition gradient). The recently established North Desert Village "experimental suburb" will be the first experimental study of its kind, with manipulations of vegetation types and irrigation methods alongside examination of people-ecological environment interactions at the neighborhood scale.

Broader Impacts. The broader impacts of the proposed CAP project include: 1) raising the profile and awareness of urban ecology in both science and society, 2) contributing to education and outreach at all levels, 3) producing and maintaining a comprehensive, long-term database of ecological and social variables for a rapidly changing socio-ecosystem, and 4) promoting knowledge exchange with community and governmental decision makers. Ecology Explorers, CAP LTER's K-12 education-outreach program, will see continued growth while maintaining its existing diversity of programs and working toward district-wide adoption of the Ecology Explorers curriculum. Two new programs are introduced to promote undergraduate involvement, including the Communities of Research Scholars and Interns. CAP LTER participants developed the ASU IGERT program in urban ecology and will continue to support graduate participation in research, introducing summer support for independent research in CAP-2. Information management will continue to develop innovative new techniques to preserve the long-term integrity and accessibility of the CAP LTER database. Finally, for knowledge exchange, CAP LTER will continue to partner with several related projects and initiatives in science-policy outreach relating to the urban environment.

BE/MUSES: Decision-support for Urban Development: Air Quality, social Justice, Material and energy and the Impact of Social Decision-making.

The focus of this BE/MUSES planning grant will be to create a prototype tool that integrates air pollution models, material and energy flow analyses, and an urban development model. The ultimate outcome is aimed at developing decision support tools for environmental management of urban systems. Such tools are expected to encourage planners to choose more renewable resources and reduce waste generation, with the ultimate goal of reducing the environmental impacts of the built environment during rapid urbanization. The research is to explore the urban funnel concept with urban metabolism metrics and visualization tools, while calibrating and validating UrbanSim, a model that predicts urban growth by simulating the interaction of social-decision-making, land development and transportation activities. The goal is also to predict spatial and temporal distribution of major air pollutants, as well as sustainability metrics such as water usage and solid waste generation. Collaboration with a regional planning agency that works with Greater Phoenix municipalities will provide assessment of the models developed. Broader impacts include education for graduate and undergraduate students as well as outreach to K-12 students and teachers, the general public, and urban planners in the Phoenix area. This planning award is co-managed by Robert O'Connor in SES / SBE and Tom Waite in BES / ENG.

This integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in urban ecology at Arizona State University. The primary study site is Phoenix and central Arizona but both historic (through archeology) and comparative approaches are employed. Intellectual merit. The purpose of the program is to provide doctoral students with enhanced cross disciplinary collaborative training in the natural and social sciences relevant to urban ecology, broadly construed. Training will involve team research through student-originated workshops, interdisciplinary "issues" seminars, dissertation research in urban ecology with an explicitly collaborative component, and an international experience. Broader impacts of the project include close attention to the conduct of research and the engagement of science with law, policy, and the public sphere. Unlike most doctoral programs in the United States that are based on independence, this program will use and investigate the efficacy of interdependence (collaboration, cooperation) as a research mode. The premise is that scientific investigation in important arenas such as cities is increasingly multidisciplinary, yet students commonly receive little direct training or experience in collaborative research strategies and group dynamics necessary for effective communication among disciplines. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Most population growth during the next 30 years will occur in urban areas. Although human activities affect the environment most intensely in cities, we lack a mechanistic understanding of ecological response to human-wrought changes in urban ecosystems. This project studies the exchange of chemical elements between land and atmosphere in Greater Phoenix and asks: Are urban elemental cycles unique among ecosystems? Ecosystem scientists, atmospheric chemists, and biogeochemists are testing the hypothesis that distinct biogeochemical pathways result from elevated inorganic nitrogen and organic carbon deposition from atmosphere to land. Researchers will examine ecosystem-level consequences of elevated nutrient deposition, test alternative hypotheses to explain ecosystem response, and evaluate whether their findings can be generalized to desert ecosystems in the Southwest and Mexico.

The project applies a range of sophisticated methods to a common problem that is close to home-the urban environment in which most humans live. The work is closely coupled with ongoing environmental investigations of rapidly growing Phoenix by an existing Long-Term Ecological Research project. In addition to conducting research, scientists are working with local decision makers, including tribal leaders, to address worsening environmental quality on the borders of rapidly expanding cities. The project also provides training for minority undergraduate students through a summer internship program, and for graduate students and a post-doctoral scholar through independent research.

EAR-0520648
Anbar

This proposal will fund an ICP-MS technical specialist to support innovative research in the newly renovated and equipped W.M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Environmental Biogeochemistry at Arizona State University (ASU). The goal of this laboratory is to promote research at the intersection of the geosciences, the life sciences and chemistry by capitalizing on recent advances in mass spectrometry. The new position will therefore support the development and application of novel analytical methods. A special focus of this position will be new types of isotopic analyses made possible by the development of multiple collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS). Examples of planned work include: the use of Mo isotope measurements in ancient sediments to reconstruct changes in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and oceans; the measurement of Fe isotopes to better understand the environmental chemistry of this biologically essential element, and exploration of Cr isotopes to trace toxic pollutants. In addition to supporting specific research projects, this award will enhance the development of a vibrant new program in isotope biogeochemistry at ASU that brings together researchers in several departments, schools, centers and institutes spanning a number of disciplines. The award will make it possible for us to effectively fold our new instruments into integrative graduate and undergraduate training as part of this program. It will also enhance the ability of ASU faculty to mentor post-Ph.D., non-tenure-track staff scientists, several of whom are involved in the planned research efforts.

Retention basins are a common approach to managing excess water from rain storms. In neighborhoods with retention basins, all of the runoff from a given area is directed into a recessed area where the water can then infiltrate into the soil or evaporate. Many studies have shown that stormwater often has high concentrations of nutrients and other pollutants, but few studies, especially in arid environments, have investigated the impacts of these additions on soil microbial processes. For this project, a storm will be simulated in two kinds of retention basins, which will be flooded with water containing a rare isotope of nitrogen. The use of the isotope enables tracking the nitrogen as it is transformed by microorganisms into various compounds, some of which are more serious pollutants than others.
Stormwater retention basins are a natural unit for management and planning, thus this research has a broader impact beyond contributing to ecological theory of urban systems. Insights from this work will create a direct benefit to society: planners, engineers, and managers will better understand how basin design influences the ability of the soils to improve water quality and reduce potential greenhouse gas emissions. Sufficient knowledge of ecological processes of and within cities is necessary for the future sustainability of urban ecological and socioeconomic systems.

Urbanization dramatically modifies the movement and transformations of nitrogen (N) compounds in semi-arid ecosystems. In particular, nitrate contamination of drinking water is a growing concern in urban areas, especially in arid and semi-arid environments, where urban runoff is actively-managed to recharge groundwater and augment water supplies. Water managers and urban planners, however, lack information on what ecosystem characteristics are most important in controlling the quality of this recharged water, especially its nitrate concentrations. This research will quantify how sources, transport, and fate of nitrate in storm runoff vary with the density and type of urban land use in Tucson and Phoenix (CAP LTER), Arizona watersheds. Seasonal patterns of nitrate export will be characterized, and new isotopic tracer techniques will be used to understand nitrate sources and mechanisms controlling nitrogen transformations along semi-arid urbanization gradients. These mechanisms will be modeled and integrated into interactive visualization products that will aid in decision-making regarding urban development patterns and storm water management approaches.

This research will help identify sources of surface water and groundwater nitrate contamination in arid and semi-arid deserts. Water is precious in these regions, yet increasing incidences of contamination of ground and surface waters threaten this vital resource. This research coordinates local (Tucson, Phoenix), state (Arizona), and federal (National Atmospheric Deposition Program/Environmental Protection Agency) resources to focus on a problem that has local, regional and global implications. The project will engage citizen-scientist volunteers, train graduate and undergraduate students in policy-relevant research, foster interactions between scientists and decision makers, and develop transferable visualization tools.

Deserts are notoriously variable environments, with some years of (relatively) abundant rainfall and others of very dry conditions. The growth and abundance of annual herbaceous plants, which grow each year from seeds deposited in previous years, are directly affected by this high variability. Besides providing beautiful desert landscapes, annual herbaceous plants also are important contributors to the cycling of nutrients and build-up of organic material in desert soils. Researchers have been investigating how air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides produced by automobiles in metro Phoenix, Arizona affect long-lived shrubs of the Sonoran Desert, but were presented with a rare opportunity to explore pollutant effects on desert annual plants because two years of above-average winter precipitation occurred in 2008 and 2009, following a decade of drought. Thus, for the first time, the combined effects of high rainfall and urban pollution on the abundance, kinds, and chemical makeup of annual herbaceous plants will be studied, and this will help advance theory and understanding of how multiple factors affect plant growth singly and in combination.

Developing an understanding of the impact of human activities (largely transportation-related) in urban areas on desert processes both within and downwind from the urban environment. Undergraduate students will gain invaluable experience through their exposure to ecological research in the habitat in which they live.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

Because climate and water are intimately linked in deserts, desert streams are well suited for observing consequences of both natural climate variability and human-caused climate change. Here, researchers propose to study how stream ecosystem structure changes as variable frequency and magnitude of both flash floods and drought periods over many years cause losses or gains in the abundance of wetland plants. A shift in stream ecosystem structure to dominance by wetland plants affects ecological functions in important but undocumented ways. Both the causes and consequences of this shift will be assessed by surveying structure, monitoring stream chemistry, comparing wetland with unvegetated stream reaches during recovery following winter-spring flooding, and statistically analyzing hydrology-ecosystem relationships. An interdisciplinary team will reevaluate stream ecosystem models and test new models using long-term data from this and other streams.

This research will promote synthesis of long-term data from aridland streams and advance understanding of these ecosystems in ways that can contribute to the general theory of stability of multiple ecosystem states. A distributed graduate seminar will give students experience with use of long-term databases and foster collaborative interactions. The database for this well-known stream ecosystem will be extended to more than 35 years and made available to the scientific and management community, potentially informing management in a highly variable environment where stressors of climate change and population growth are converging.

For more than three decades, the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program has supported fundamental ecological research that requires long time periods and large spatial scales at a coordinated network of more than two dozen field sites. Since 1998, the LTER Program has supported two sites in urban settings to explicitly examine the interactions among human activities and ecological processes in metropolitan settings. This award provides renewed support for the Central Arizona Phoenix (CAP) long-term ecological research (LTER) project. CAP's central question is: How do the services provided by evolving urban ecosystems affect human outcomes and behavior, and how does human action (response) alter patterns of ecosystem structure and function and, ultimately, urban sustainability, in a dynamic environment? Working from a conceptual framework that links the social and ecological spheres of urban socioecological systems via ecosystem services, CAP will continue to build foundational databases of land-use and land-cover change, human attitudes, and human perceptions with respect to the environment; an extensive snapshot of ecological variables across the 6400-square km study area; household- and neighborhood-scale responses to experimental manipulation of residential landscapes; and demographic and economic variables. Based on these foundations, ongoing and new research will be conducted in four integrative project areas: (1) Climate, Ecosystems and People; (2) Water Dynamics in a Desert City; (3) Biogeochemical Patterns, Processes, and Human Outcomes; and (4) Human Decisions and Biodiversity. New activities will be undertaken both to synthesize more than 12 years of existing data and to work with other scientists, decision makers, and the public in collaboratively producing a vision for a sustainable future in central Arizona.

In terms of intellectual merit, this project will enhance basic scientific understanding by developing and testing theories regarding socioecological systems in urban contexts, using a place-based, transdisciplinary approach. The project's long-term database will be further developed and used to test new hypotheses about ecosystem services in designed and highly modified urban environments. New work on land cover will include three distinct scales (parcel, metropolitan, regional "megapolitan"), adding object-based analysis of high-resolution imagery to address questions about ecosystem services associated with different land configurations (architectures), vegetationwaterheat interactions, and movement of water during storms. Water-related projects bring new hydrologic expertise and models to bear on questions of landscape redistribution of water and connectivity, ecosystem services, and virtual water. Biogeochemical research will continue to focus on altered cycles and will add analysis of persistent organic pollutants. A new perspective of "the urban food web" will organize biodiversity research, which continues to focus on mechanistic explanations for biodiversity change in the face of urbanization. Throughout much of its work, CAP will launch systematic treatments of tradeoffs among ecosystem services and between those services and human outcomes.

With respect to broader impacts, this project will raise scientists' and decision makers' awareness of cities as socioecological platforms for solving sustainability challenges. It will integrate education and outreach at all levels, and it will continue to develop and maintain a comprehensive, long-term database of ecological and social variables for a rapidly changing system. CAP also will bring together researchers with community and governmental decision makers to develop strategies for developing a sustainable future in central Arizona and similar kinds of urban environments.

Abstract SES-1444755


Urban areas are vulnerable to extreme weather related events given their location, high concentration of people, and increasingly complex and interdependent infrastructure. Impacts of Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and other disasters demonstrate not just failures in built infrastructure, they highlight the inadequacy of institutions, resources, and information systems to prepare for and respond to events of this magnitude. The highly interdisciplinary and geographically dispersed Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) team will develop a diverse suite of new methods and tools to assess how infrastructure can be more resilient, provide ecosystem services, improve social well being, and exploit new technologies in ways that benefit all segments of urban populations. Starting with nine network cities (six continental U.S. and three Latin American, home to over 35 million residents) and expanding in future years, the vision of the UREx SRN is to co-produce the knowledge needed to promote resilient, livable cities in a future that will look very different from today. The extreme events that this project will focus on include urban flooding, coastal storms, regional droughts, and extreme heat waves. These events are already occurring with shocking frequency in U.S. and global cities. Infrastructure is viewed as an important line of defense against hazards and disasters, yet current urban infrastructure is aging and proving inadequate for protecting city populations. The UREx team will link SRN scientists, students, local practitioners, planners, industry, NGOs, and other stakeholders across >25 institutions and >70 collaborators to co-produce data, models, images, stories, and on-the-ground projects that show how a new resilient infrastructure can be developed. Infrastructure that is flexible, adaptable, safe-to-fail, socially equitable, and ecologically based will enhance urban resilience in the face of a higher incidence of extreme events, more culturally diverse communities, and continued urbanization pressures. Ultimately, the UREx SRN will help accelerate knowledge generation and application to encourage innovative strategies towards urban sustainability.


The Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) will develop a novel theoretical framework for integrating social, ecological, and technological system (SETS) dimensions for conceptualizing, analyzing, and supporting urban infrastructure decisions in the face of climatic uncertainty in a more holistic way. The primary research question is: how do SETS domains interact to generate vulnerability or resilience to extreme weather related events, and how can urban SETS dynamics be guided along more resilient, equitable, and sustainable trajectories? The foundation of the network is eight working groups (WG) who will work together to answer this question. Network activities include: assembling comparable datasets for the cities; doing advanced climate and hydrological modeling and downscaling; conducting comparative analyses; further developing the SETS conceptual framework; experimenting with new visualization and computation approaches for representing the data and the SETS framework; using these products in participatory modeling and scenario analysis for each city; and developing the science and practice for transitioning infrastructure to meet 21st century resilience and sustainability goals. Continual network and educational evaluation will allow realignment and adjustment of the work based on iterative assessments. The program will develop a suite of interactive educational activities spanning institutions across the network, and including local practitioners as well as university students and young professionals. Working Groups include integral educational, communications, and diversity-enhancing activities for graduate and post-doctoral fellows, early-career researchers, and city professionals aimed at developing a model for co-producing effective and robust decision-support tools and educating the next generation of scientists and practitioners to carry out this work. These programs are expected to be especially attractive to Hispanic students and practitioners due to the project's focus on understanding the increasing cultural and intellectual connections of the U.S. and Latin America.

The strategic goals of the UREx SRN are to:
1)Build a network of cities, institutions, and student, post-doctoral, and faculty researchers to explore resilience of cities to extreme weather related events;
2)Develop novel theoretical frameworks that express a vision of sustainable, integrated urban infrastructure that is flexible, adaptable, safe-to-fail, socially equitable, and ecologically based;
3)Work with practitioners and decision makers, as well as a cadre of graduate and post-doctoral fellows, to co-produce knowledge that facilitates data-driven visioning and ultimately transitions to a sustainable future for urban infrastructure and, by extension, the fabric of urban social-ecological-technological sustainability; and
4)Create a model for incorporating assessment, learning, and adjustment in response to evaluative feedback in a large, transdisciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-national research network.

River and wetland ecosystems provide important ecosystem services that are determined by climate, such as water for human uses and habitat support for fish and wildlife. In southwestern deserts of the United States, years of extreme drought often follow years of very wet conditions, thus it is impossible to define river ecosystem services in terms of average conditions. In fact, high variability is an apt descriptor of the hydrologic regimes for streams in this region. In this project, researchers are using new statistical techniques that describe hydrological regimes, coupled with long-term measurements of stream structure and processes, to understand how shifts in climate and river discharge regimes on many time scales will influence the ecosystem. The research will focus on factors that explain why the abundance and distribution of wetland plants and the degree of nitrogen limitation vary dramatically among years. Also, the variation among years in patterns of change after spring floods - in primary production, nutrient retention, and community composition (of invertebrates and plants)- will be related to within- and among-year variation in hydrology, to determine the impact of regimes on these successional patterns. Finally, an interdisciplinary team of collaborators will reevaluate stream ecosystem models and test new models using long-term data from this and other desert streams.

This research will advance synthesis of long-term data from desert streams and advance understanding in ways that can contribute to the general theory of stability of multiple ecosystem states. A graduate student-led workshop will give students experience in using long-term databases and foster collaborative interactions. Activities of a collaboratory will expand the coupling of innovative hydrologic time-series analyses with ecological data. The database for this well-known stream ecosystem will be extended to more than 40 years and made available to the scientific and management community, potentially informing management in a highly variable environment where stressors of climate change and population growth are converging.

Biologists have used a well accepted classification system to identify regional areas by the major or predominant vegetation biomes. This largely land-based classification system has been very useful in conducting research and understanding the environmental, geological, and biological features of those regions. These factors influence how ecological systems within the biome are structured and how they function. The classification scheme provides a framework for site- specific research to be understood in a larger regional context and scale the results to the larger region. A weakness or missing part of this framework is streams and rivers. Most maps or lists of biomes of the world would suggest that flowing waters are so similar to one another that all streams can be lumped into a single category. They are generally lumped together regardless of the regional geology, watershed vegetation, or climatic factors. This research will develop a biome classification system for streams to better understand how streams function and provide an ability to predict how streams will change from human and environmental factors.

This continental scale project will address the deceptively simple question: is there such a thing as a stream biome? From an ecosystem perspective we now know that inland waters play critical roles in both global carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling. The physical diversity of lotic waters as well as their tendency is more temporally dynamic than terrestrial systems. Ultimately the phenology of stream ecosystem energetics will be a function of energy supply (light and fixed terrestrial carbon) and fixed carbon removal (via hydrologic disturbance). Watershed structure determines the route and rate at which water enters stream channels while watershed vegetation determines the magnitude and timing of fixed carbon inputs and the degree and temporal patterning of light availability. This research effort will increase the measurements of annual metabolism by nearly two orders of magnitude. At the present time there exist only two streams for which annual metabolic rates have been calculated using continuous dissolved oxygen measurements. By the conclusion of this project 55 years of high quality metabolism data will have been generated for a total of 35 streams, and the project PIs will have acquired (via leveraged funds and collaborations) metabolism data for at least 196 additional streams. Metabolism metrics from all of these streams will be used to build the first hierarchical classification of stream ecosystems based on their seasonal and annual patterns of primary productivity and ecosystem respiration. Stream biome delineation will facilitate estimation of stream metabolic rates at timescales of days to years for spatial scales from reaches to river networks. Simulation models, developed from first principles and refined with empirical data specific to each biome, will forecast changes in metabolic rates in response to likely climate and land use change scenarios. The data management plan has been designed in collaboration with informatics staff of the USGS Center for Integrated Data Analytics and USGS has agreed to host and help develop a public data repository, modeling, and data visualization platform specifically designed to collate long-term or high-resolution metabolism and dissolved oxygen datasets for streams. By building, refining and activating a community data platform this research program will change the way individual streams are studied and will facilitate and encourage near instantaneous cross-site synthesis. In addition to capacity building, this project will directly support seven graduate students and 7 postdoctoral associates over the funding period.

Humans are becoming an increasingly urban species, pointing to the profound importance of understanding how urban ecosystems function. Cities are concentrated consumers of energy and resources and producers of various wastes, but they are also centers of social networks, innovation, efficiency, and solutions. The Central Arizona Phoenix Long-term Ecological Research Program (CAP LTER) includes scientists and students from a variety of disciplines focused on understanding cities as hybrid ecosystems with interacting environmental and human components. The scientific objectives guiding this research are: 1) to answer fundamental questions about ecological structure and function of urban ecosystems that require a long-term perspective and 2) to develop general theory and models to deepen understanding of cities as social-ecological systems. The CAP science program includes innovative investigations of land use and land cover change, social and ecological surveys and long-term experiments designed to test hypotheses about social and biophysical factors influencing energy flow, nutrient cycling and food webs in the city of Phoenix. In addition, CAP researchers are committed to partnering with stakeholders to develop pathways to designing resilient and sustainable cities, and educating urban dwellers of all ages and experiences. Ecology Explorers, the premier CAP education program, connects teachers and pre-college students with CAP scientists. CAP is also expanding the involvement of Phoenix residents in scientific research by working with community partners such as the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy, the Central Arizona Conservation Alliance, the Desert Botanical Garden, the Valley Permaculture Alliance, and numerous municipal agencies. Finally, the large, diverse, and rich database produced by CAP research continues to be a valuable and growing resource for a global community of scientists and students, city managers and decision makers, teachers, and the general public.

Understanding the structure and function of urban ecosystems remains central to the CAP enterprise. The central question is: How do the services provided by dynamic urban ecosystems and their infrastructure affect human outcomes and behavior, and how do human actions affect patterns of urban ecosystem structure and function and, ultimately, urban sustainability and resilience? This question highlights the interconnectedness of human motivations, behaviors, actions, and outcomes with physical and biological structure and function in urban ecosystems. The overarching goal is to foster social-ecological urban research aimed at understanding these complex systems using a holistic, ecology of cities perspective while contributing to an ecology for cities that enhances urban sustainability and resilience. A new theoretical focus is on urban infrastructure as a critical bridge between the system's biophysical and human/social components. Infrastructure is thus central to the conceptual framework that guides all CAP activities. CAP researchers explore new social-ecological frontiers of interdisciplinary urban ecology in residential landscapes, urban waterbodies, desert parks and preserves, the flora, fauna, and climate of a riparianized desert city, and urban design and governance. Research activities are organized around eight interdisciplinary questions and 11 long-term datasets and experiments, and researchers are organized into eight Interdisciplinary Research Themes to ensure multiple perspectives are brought to bear on all questions. This structure will ensure CAP continues to make fundamental contributions to urban systems theory, knowledge, and predictive capacity while helping Phoenix and other cities cope with an increasingly uncertain future.

Coastal communities are particularly vulnerable to increased risk from sea-level rise and coastal, riverine, and urban flooding. An aging urban infrastructure is proving inadequate for protecting communities from the impacts of these events. Disasters make evident that failures take place not just in the built infrastructure, but also in the information infrastructure that engineers and decision-makers use to prepare and respond. Limitations in information and data systems constrain the ability of cities to learn, adapt, and reduce the vulnerability of their populations to various extreme events. Civic leaders, data scientists, entrepreneurs, and nonprofit organizations increasingly are interested in using "smart city" technologies to optimize city operations; however, their effectiveness depends on multiple technological, cognitive, social, and institutional factors. This SCC Planning Grant will be used to design a research program that advances understanding of the socio-political, ecological, and technological conditions for S&CC that promote coastal resilience and transformation. The team will nurture new, integrative, and interdisciplinary research collaborations, develop research capacity-building activities, and undertake meaningful community engagement in the coastal communities of Miami, San Juan, and Baltimore. Collectively, these coastal communities cover a population of more than a million people that will benefit from this project. Specific objectives are to: 1) develop a diverse research community to advance fundamental understanding of smart and connected communities; 2) engage multiple practitioners and stakeholders to contribute to planning and establishing direction of the research program; and 3) develop and foster research-practitioner interactions and research capacity through Innovation Webinars, Dialogues, and Labs.

The overall strategy of this SCC Planning Grant consists of bringing together small groups of researchers, subject matter experts, and community stakeholders in a variety of innovative and collaborative activities in each of three coastal cities: Miami, San Juan, and Baltimore. A transdisciplinary team will be assembled that encompasses social science, natural science, and engineering fields, including risk communication, science and technology studies, data and computation science, and communication. Data resources and outputs from the three coastal cities will be used to advance fundamental understanding of smart and connected communities from a social-ecological-technological systems approach. Innovative tools for virtual communication, data sharing, idea nurturing, and product generation will facilitate interaction and underpin communication. Strategies for maximizing participation of students and early-career scientists in each city will be employed to enhance their research capacities on social and technical aspects of the cities' information and technology needs. Researchers and communities will co-develop a vision for an integrated research program for a smart city framework of the future that includes: 1) advances in theories of knowledge co-production by examining social practices that institutions use to produce, share, and use information for envisioning and implementing strategies in their communities; 2) novel methodologies for collecting, managing, analyzing, and visualizing more diverse data to assist communities in exploring their resilience and envisioning sustainable futures from an integrative perspective; 3) understanding of the social, political, ecological, and ethical implications of smart and connected technologies; and, 4) new approaches in the modeling and design of complex infrastructures that take into account the dynamic nature of climate systems and cities.

Non-technical abstract: People living in cities in all regions of the world are experiencing increases in extreme events like floods and heat waves. Urban decision makers need help to develop ways to meet this challenge that are based in scientific understanding. This International Research Experience for Students (IRES) grant is linked to the Urban Resilience to Extremes (UREx) Sustainability Research Network (SRN). The grant will support three graduate students and one undergraduate student each year for ten weeks work in Valdivia, Chile (2017); Hermosillo, Mexico (2018); and in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (2019). A total of nine UREx IRES graduate students will be trained over three years, broadening their skills in collaboration, transdisciplinary research methods, and in mentoring. They will gain appreciation for the unique challenges of Latin American cities, while benefiting from the opportunity to participate in research that is directly used by decision makers, and receive training and experience in workshop facilitation with local decision-makers and communities. Three UREx IRES undergraduate students will also gain research experience in a foreign country, learn about the process of science through not only conducting their own research project but working closely with graduate students conducting research, and gain skills in research design, data analysis and management, and presentation. This experience will help all of these students learn to work across diverse social and political cultures so that they might be more effective. The students who participate in this program will share their experiences with others in the UREx program through a reading group, blogs, and social media and at a capstone symposium to be organized in 2020 by UREx fellows.


Technical description: Cities are highly vulnerable to extreme, weather-related events, given their location along coastlines and in drylands. As urbanization continues as the main demographic trend worldwide, an ever-greater proportion of the population is exposed to hazard. Little research has been done on Latin American cities, where strategies to enhance their resilience in the face of such events may differ from US cities owing to cultural, political, or biophysical differences. The UREx SRN is a multi-city network of scientists and local practitioners, including Latin American cities, which studies, envisions, and develops innovative solutions to the challenges of these extreme events. Linked to the UREx SRN, the UREx IRES program will train students in working across cultures and disciplines and with local decision-makers. Mentors at the host institutions are collaborators in the UREx SRN and are conducting urban resilience research in these cities. The UREx IRES will afford opportunities for nine UREx fellows to expand their dissertation research into these Latin American cities, enabling projects that can be used to compare resilient solutions between US and Latin American cities. Three UREx IRES undergraduates will be selected to work on research projects in close collaboration with the graduate students, supervised by host mentors. The students' creativity is emphasized: as part of the UREx SRN they will have had experience with interdisciplinary research, training on Latin American cities, and will write a short research proposal that explains how their IRES project will integrate with their dissertation research and contribute to the overall knowledge-to-action efforts in the host city. UREx IRES fellows will be conducting transdisciplinary research with practitioners and host mentors that will advance basic scientific understanding of the characteristics of urban areas in general and infrastructure in particular that will lead to more resilient, and ultimately sustainable, cities in the future.

1927468 (Grimm) 1927167 (McPhearson). Cities and urbanized regions worldwide are exposed to extreme weather events and rising seas. They are at risk because their infrastructure often is in disrepair, no longer appropriate for more intense or frequent extreme events, or unable to keep up with rapid urban population growth. Traditional engineered infrastructure, such as stormwater drainage systems or sea walls, is usually designed for only one purpose and seldom can adapt to changing conditions. Solutions that are based on nature-preserving protective ecosystems, incorporating ecological elements or even mimicking nature in built infrastructure, offer flexibility in the face of changing conditions and provide multiple benefits to society, often at relatively low cost. The NATure-based solutions to Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene (NATURA) project links 26 networks to enhance connectivity among the world's scholars and practitioners and improve the prospects for global urban sustainability. NATURA exchanges knowledge, shares data, and enhances communication among research disciplines and across the research-practice divide to advance understanding of how to prepare for the growing threat of extreme weather events. As an important part of this knowledge sharing, learning exchanges will build capacity of the next generation of researchers and practitioners to work together on applications of nature-based solutions in a wide range of social, ecological, and technological contexts.

The NATURA international network of networks brings together research scientists (ecologists, engineers, and social scientists) and city practitioners (such as officials from city, county, or state governments, members of non-governmental organizations, and community leaders) who work on devising and implementing solutions to the challenge of extreme events. NATURA will unite 21 networks focused in Europe, South Africa, China, North and South America, and globally with 5 U.S.-based networks that are conducting research and implementing nature-based solutions. NATURA will advance theory and research on nature-based solutions, identifying and filling research gaps across diverse global social-biophysical contexts to understand where nature-based solutions are unique or can be more generally applied to meet urban resilience challenges. Through all-hands meetings, thematic working groups, regional nodes, and synthesis writing workshops, the project will accomplish the goals of synthesis and data sharing, and network coordination. Early-career researchers and practitioners will be sponsored by NATURA to pay five-week visits to network partners. Further, NATURA will train postdoctoral scholars and graduate students through learning exchanges to networks around the globe. Through collaboration with partners, international students will be invited to participate in these exchanges, hosted by US networks.

The Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet) program is designed to accelerate the process of scientific discovery and prepare the next generation of U.S. researchers for multiteam international collaborations. The AccelNet program supports strategic linkages among U.S. research networks and complementary networks abroad that will leverage research and educational resources to tackle grand scientific challenges that require significant coordinated international efforts. This project was co-funded by the Division of Environmental Biology (BIO/DEB).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

In June 2020, the 5th largest fire on record in Arizona burned Sonoran Desert and high-elevation forests in the watershed of Sycamore Creek, an ecosystem that has been studied for over 40 years. Disturbances like fires, when combined with monsoon and winter rainstorms, can result in runoff that carries large amounts of sediments, dissolved carbon, and nutrients. These runoff events also can reduce the concentration of dissolved oxygen. High sediment, carbon and nutrient loads and low dissolved oxygen degrade the quality of water that ultimately contributes to the water supply for downstream metro Phoenix. However, ecosystems might absorb these effects by trapping sediment and taking up nutrients, diminishing the effects of the fire on downstream ecosystems. This RAPID award will study the inputs of sediments, carbon, and nutrients from burned compared to unburned tributaries during monsoon and winter frontal storms. They will observe potential changes in the stream ecosystem immediately following storms and one year after the fire, including plant and invertebrate communities, processing of carbon and oxygen, and channel shape. Large fires are rare in the Sonoran Desert, but are expected to become more common due to growth of invasive grasses and human activity. The research will aid forest and municipal water managers in predicting the consequences of arid land fires, and help support the professional development of one technician, one graduate student, and one undergraduate student.

A large-scale wildfire in June 2020 burned >780 km2 of Sonoran Desert and higher-elevation woodland and forest in Arizona, including nearly half of the Sycamore Creek watershed, the site of 40 years of stream ecological research and a NEON aquatic site. Large-scale fire in the desert Southwest was historically rare or non-existent but is becoming increasingly common, owing to invasive grasses and human activity, yet little is known about the effects of fire on the structure and function of desert streams. The headwaters and mainstem of Sycamore Creek were unburned in the 2020 fire, but all eastern tributaries burned; thus, potential effects of the fire on the stream ecosystem will be indirect and driven by episodic hydrologic connections between the burned uplands and the stream. Such connections during the upcoming summer monsoon and winter frontal storm seasons present an immediate opportunity to study the effects of a novel disturbance and observe how disturbances are propagated between ecosystems. Proposed research will investigate the impacts of arid land fire on water flows, sediment and nutrient loading, and organic carbon inputs during storms that connect the desert uplands with the stream, using continuous sensor records and event-based sampling. Examination of in-stream responses, both immediately and after one year, will identify the capacity for receiving ecosystems to absorb and mitigate this disturbance. Observations of in-stream responses will include macroinvertebrate communities; modeling of stream metabolism and measures of organic carbon uptake by microbes; and changes in channel morphology, surface-water extent, and the distribution of wetland vegetation along 12 km of the mainstem. Data and findings from the research will be shared with agencies responsible for management of forests and water supply to the Phoenix metro area.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Cities all over the world are looking for innovative ways of envisioning and implementing nature-based solutions to complex urban development challenges in the context of global climate change. Latin American cities offer unique opportunities for North American students to build critical skills for working across diverse social and political cultures while learning from scientists and professionals about ways of advancing more resilient and sustainable cities. In collaboration with the NATURA (NATure-based solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene) project, this International Research Experience for Students (IRES) project supports the training and development of 15 students in cross-cultural and international research approaches that advance a scientific and cultural understanding of the benefits of nature-based solutions in urban areas. For three years, this program will bring together a cohort of five U.S. undergraduate and graduate students annually to spend ten weeks learning from host city professionals and scientists about creative solutions that respond to local needs in Guayaquil (Ecuador, 2022), Santiago (Chile, 2023), and Hermosillo (México, 2024). Furthermore, students will participate in an interdisciplinary, bilingual, online spring-semester course co-taught with faculty from their host country, to develop their research proposals and become familiar with the local context prior to departure. Training a new generation of students capable of tackling climate change and urbanization requires crucial social competencies not traditionally taught in universities, such as collaboration skills and the ability to communicate and navigate across different disciplines and sectors in society. Students in this IRES project are developing these skills through direct field experience with a collaborative research team to understand and intervene in the environmental and social challenges of urbanization and climate change across diverse cultural contexts in Latin American cities.

In Latin America, where many cities face climatic and other environmental threats compounded by rapid urbanization and growth, the deployment of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) offers an alternative development pathway with the potential to satisfy social, ecological, and infrastructural needs. Despite their promise, NBS have not been broadly incorporated into academic research nor into regional planning agendas. We propose an International Research Experience for Students (IRES) program that will be linked to the NATURA (NATure-based solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene) project, focusing on working with local practitioners and scientists in Latin American cities to study, envision, and develop innovative NBS to urban challenges. The main objective of the proposed program is to help students learn to work across diverse social and political cultures so that they may be effective change agents in the Anthropocene. This IRES program will bring a cohort of five undergraduate and graduate students each year for ten weeks to Guayaquil (Ecuador, 2022), Santiago (Chile, 2023), and Hermosillo (México, 2024), with Bogotá (Colombia) and San José (Costa Rica) as alternates. As part of their training, US graduate students will participate in an interdisciplinary, bilingual, online spring-semester course co-taught with faculty from their host country, which will help them to develop their research proposals and become familiar with the local context prior to departure. Mentors at the host institutions, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral in Guayaquil (ESPOL), Universidad Mayor in Santiago (UM), Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora in Hermosillo (ITSON), Universidad de LaSalle in Bogotá (ULS), and Universidad de Costa Rica in San José (UCR) are, or will become, collaborators of NATURA and are already leading research on NBS in these cities. In this proposal, we emphasize student creativity and fit with the local context; hence, each year potential research topics will change in response to specific needs. Graduate students will write research proposals as part of their applications and further refine them in the course; undergraduate students will develop small projects within the context of graduate student or host research during their stay. As part of the IRES program, all students will have experience with transdisciplinary, collaborative research on environmental and social challenges in Latin American cities. Ancillary benefits to U.S. students will include cultural understanding and language learning, and projects that potentially integrate with their dissertation or honors research and contribute to the overall knowledge-to-action efforts in the host city, all of which will contribute to the development of a globally engaged U.S. workforce in climate sciences research and practice.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.