CAREER: Dynamic connectivity: a research and educational frontier for sustainable environmental management under climate and land use uncertainty

职业：动态连通性：气候和土地利用不确定性下可持续环境管理的研究和教育前沿

• 批准号: 2340161
• 负责人: Admin Husic
• 金额: $ 60.97万
• 依托单位: University of Kansas Center for Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-08-01 至 2029-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2340161&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Dynamic; connectivity; research; educational

Dynamic landscapes represent a network of hydrologic, environmental, and anthropogenic features that work in tandem to confer ecosystem benefits and provide for societal demands. Increasingly, landscapes are at risk under the growing pressures of land use alteration and climate change. Understanding how landscapes dynamically connect the transfer of water, sediment, and nutrients to rivers and the role humans play in modulating this connectivity is crucial if we are to sustainably manage our shared water resources. Thus, the driving questions behind this work are “how have humans changed the landscapes around us for the worse and how are we able to manage them for the better?” This project will answer these questions and advance the frontiers of research and education for sustainable water management by coupling agricultural, municipal, and stormwater expertise together with high-frequency aquatic sensing, deep learning modeling, and large-sample water quality datasets. This research will generate fundamental scientific advances to identify the magnitude, duration, and extent of landscape loading to river systems across climatological, geomorphic, and anthropogenic settings. The education of today’s students, who will become tomorrow’s stakeholders, is deeply embedded in this project through hands-on experiences that will equip them with the confidence and communication skills to handle big data and tackle society’s grandest water challenges. Contemporary research in hydrologic sciences recognizes the importance of connectivity in most aspects of the water cycle; however, despite its ubiquity, connectivity is often assessed either qualitatively or in a static, structural context. The proposed research has the potential to be transformative in moving toward a dynamic assessment of connectivity. This project will quantify dynamic connectivity through time and across space for the United States. This will be achieved by leveraging high-frequency aquatic sensors for nitrate and turbidity from over 150 rivers, which serve as training data for a deep learning model. Further, a mathematical description of dynamic connectivity will inform dominant pathways of connection. Explainable machine learning techniques will link how dynamic landscape attributes lead to riverine water quality impacts. Thereafter, the potential to use dynamic connectivity as a management tool will be assessed through a web application developed for practitioners. The outcomes will lead directly into the education and training of the stakeholders-of-tomorrow, including through building big data confidence in high school settings and science communication skills in college students.This project is jointly funded by Hydrologic Sciences and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.

动态景观代表了水文、环境和人为特征的网络，这些特征协同作用，赋予生态系统效益并满足社会需求，在土地利用改变和气候变化日益增长的压力下，景观面临着越来越大的风险。如果我们要可持续地管理我们共享的水资源，水、沉积物和养分向河流的转移以及人类在调节这种连通性方面所发挥的作用至关重要。因此，这项工作背后的驱动问题是“人类如何改变了地貌”。我们周围的情况变得更糟，我们如何才能更好地管理它们？该项目将回答这些问题，并通过将农业、市政和雨水专业知识与高频相结合，推进可持续水管理的研究和教育前沿。”这项研究将产生基础科学进展，以确定气候、地貌和人类环境对河流系统的景观负荷的大小、持续时间和范围。学生，谁将成为明天的利益相关者，通过实践经验深入参与该项目，这将使他们具备处理大数据和应对社会最严峻的水挑战的信心和沟通技巧，当代水文科学研究认识到连通性在大多数方面的重要性。然而，尽管连通性无处不在，但它通常是在定性或静态、结构背景下进行评估，该项目将量化随时间变化的动态连通性。并跨越空间这将通过利用来自 150 多条河流的硝酸盐和浊度高频水生传感器来实现，这些传感器作为深度学习模型的训练数据。此外，动态连接的数学描述将告知主要的连接路径。可解释的机器学习技术将连接动态景观属性如何影响河流水质。此后，将通过为从业者开发的网络应用程序评估使用动态连接作为管理工具的潜力，结果将直接用于教育和培训。的未来的利益相关者，包括通过在高中环境中建立大数据信心和大学生的科学传播技能。该项目由水文科学和刺激竞争性研究既定计划 (EPSCoR) 共同资助。该奖项是 NSF 的法定使命通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，并被认为值得支持。