Soil and Water Conservation Modeling: MODELING SUMMIT SUMMARY COMMENTS Dennis Ojima Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY 31 MARCH 2011 Denver, CO

Ecosystem Services and Society Soil and water conservation goals are central to social well-being and to reducing environmental degradation Needed for reducing perverse outcomes or unintended consequences Assessment tools for scenario analyses of management options and policy decisions Interdisciplinary efforts needed for joint social science – biophysical science to make a difference

CHALLENGES and NEEDS OF Model Development, Inter-comparison, Integration, and Interpretation Multiple Stresses Interactive Sectors Increasing Human Pressures –(e.g., bioenergy, conservation, food production, water usage and sources, energy production, etc) Information Exchange to Multiple Publics –Scientist within and across disciplines –Managers –Policy Makers –Public at Large

GHG VOC, NOx O3 SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEM

Advancing Modeling Approaches WHY NOW? Grand Challenges facing Environmental Sciences –Land Use; Water Resources, Climate change ; Biodiversity; Biogeochemical cycles; Infectious disease; Invasive species New Observational Systems New Cyber Infrastructure Developments Development of Data-Model Fusion Techniques

NEON: A continental research platform designed to provide the capacity to forecast future states of ecological systems for the advancement of science and the benefit of society National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Novel infrastructure that: allows scientists to observe the previously unobservable scale from m 2 to continent evaluate fundamental theory at regional to continental scale enables a new forecasting and predictive capacity for ecology takes advantage of new and evolving in situ sensing technologies couples human and natural systems

Multi-sensor/Multi-scale Modeling Framework Nemani et al., 2003, EOM White & Nemani, 2004, CJRS

FROM PETABYTE TO SOUNDBYTE

Integrated Earth System Approach Linking earth system components together provides a framework to analyze interactions of land use and environmental changes. Analysis provides an analytical tool to guide new policy and understanding of changes to the social-environmental system

Collect data from digital libraries, laboratories, and observation Analyze the data with models run on the grid Visualize and share data over the Web Publish results in a digital library Changing How Science is Done

SCIENCE BASED: Developing and testing theory and models requires integration of complex in situ process data with large gridded data sets. MULTI-SCALED: Required data are multi-scale, many formats, originating in multiple disciplines. AGILE: Rapid prototyping and development cycle to maximize user control of information systems, implies incorporating existing state-of-the-art components rather than de novo development USER-DRIVEN: Data systems must allow user-driven, knowledge-based querying of multiple data types Information Technology for Soil and Water Analysis

Modeling Applications Understanding Evaluation Scaling Integration Synthesis Forecasting COMMUNICATION &TRANSLATION COLLABORATION EDUCATION & TRAINING

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