Members of the NASA-sponsored Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability
Experiment (ABoVE) travelled this week to Anchorage, Alaska to host the second
of its Science Team meetings. ABoVE (http://above.nasa.gov/)
is a large-scale study of environmental change and its implications for
social-ecological systems. It selected 21 projects last fall with a diversity
of field, remote sensing, and modeling studies slated to begin this year in
Alaska and western Canada.
NGEE Arctic is a core project in the ABoVE field campaign.
Last November, at their first Science Team meeting in Minnesota, there was
great interaction among the project participants. Working groups were formed to
ensure integration across the various projects. NGEE Arctic is contributing to
several working groups including the Hydrology and Permafrost Working Group led
by John Kimball. We are currently in the process of developing an
implementation plan that describes how the various field activities will be coordinated
to achieve goals of the ABoVE project. This involves discussions of field sites,
measurements to be taken, modeling activities, and data sets and derived-products
to be developed. The NGEE Arctic project is quite interested in helping to
define the airborne remote sensing needs of ABoVE as our project needs these
products in order to effectively implement our scaling strategy for global
climate models.
While the meeting in Minnesota was to coordinate PIs funded
through ABoVE, the Science Team meeting in Anchorage is designed to bring
together the many stakeholders in Alaska and Canada who share a common interest
in climate change, ecosystem services, resource management, and interactions
between social and ecological systems. We have heard a number of excellent
presentations in the last two days, mostly from representatives of state and
federal agencies, and native organizations. It has been helpful to learn about
all the relevant research being conducted throughout the Arctic-boreal region,
and to consider how those data-rich resources, including traditional knowledge,
can be brought to bear on topics of interest to ABoVE. Presentations from
native communities have been especially interesting as they bring a unique
perspective to the topic of climate change given their close association with
the environment.
Our plan in the NGEE Arctic project is to continue our
interaction with NASA and share information derived from our studies on the North
Slope and Seward Peninsula with others on the ABoVE Science Team. Our sponsors
at the Department of Energy, Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
program are highly supportive of this inter-agency collaboration. We share many
goals and objectives with ABoVE, and it is clear that we have the opportunity to
develop strong and complementary interactions in the coming years.
