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ECI Working Groups

By combining perspectives from several disciplines, environmental scientists can better understand the relationships between human activities and the natural world. However, such projects often require longer than usual development times because researchers must absorb the customs, language, and techniques of a new field in order to work productively together.

To address that challenge, the Environmental Change Initiative provides seed funding to interdisciplinary working groups. Working groups funded in the 2008-2009 academic year include:

• Conservation Medicine. Organized by Kate Smith, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and Mark Lurie, assistant professor of community health, the working group is sponsoring a series of guest speakers, a bi-weekly discussion group, and a research symposium. More>>
• Amazon Cropland Frontier. Organized by Chris Neill, senior scientist at the Ecosystem Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory, and Leah VanWey, associate professor of sociology, the amazon cropland frontiers working group is collecting pilot data on the factors that influence land use decisions by agricultural landowners at the edge of the Amazon forest and how those decisions affect water quality, air pollution, soil erosion, and fire risk. More>>
• Climate Envelopes. Species can adapt to a changing climate by moving the geographic range in which they live or through genetic and behavioral responses to an altered growing season. Current predictions of species ranges under climate change usually consider these two factors separately but each depends strongly on the other. Regan Early and Amity Wilczek, both postdoctoral fellows, have received funding through ECI to write a review paper summarizing the available knowledge regarding phenological adaptation to climate change and how species distribution model (SDM) predictions might be altered by inclusion of phenological data.
• Phenology and Climate Change. Understanding the seasonal timing (phenology) of biological events such as bud burst, dormancy, flowering time, and fruit set is crucial for understanding ecosystem structure, function, services, and their response to climate change. For example, Zhang et al. (2007) have observed significant changes in the timing of vegetation greenup induced by recent warming. On the other hand, phenological shifts also feedback to the climate system through changing the global carbon cycle and energy balance. The lengthened growing season may increase photosynthetic carbon uptake. At the same time, increased temperature may increase respiratory carbon emissions. Earlier snow melting and bud burst may alter water cycles and surface albedo. These shifts in the timing, length, and pattern of feedbacks may trigger the change of the whole system, including physical events (e.g. ocean and atmospheric circulation and fluxes and precipitation pattern), biological events (e.g., species composition, migration, food web, competition, etc.), and human activities (e.g., crop harvest, forest yield, etc.).

Remote sensing data on vegetation phenology are available at a range of scales and are being used to test climatic phenology models. The development of the USA National Phenology network (http://www.usanpn.org/) provides new opportunities to access diverse data sets across scales. 

This working group is organized by Jim Tang, assistant scientist in the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory; Johanna Schmitt, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the Environmental Change Initiative; and Jack Mustard, professor of geological sciences. ECI funds will support a one-day workshop exploring opportunities to integrate the study of phenology across multiple scales from genomic through microbial to ecosystem, regional, and global scales.

• Climate Variability. In between “weather” and “climate” lie a number of climate phenomena that cause departures in temperature and rainfall from average values.  The best-known examples of these anomalies are the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (timescales of 4-7 years and 8-15 years, respectively). The presence of climate anomalies on this time scale affect planning decisions: what appear to be trends over several years and perhaps decades may in fact be part of a natural (and only partially predictable) cycle which will return to another state shortly.

Jim Russell, an assistant professor of geological sciences is taking the lead on a working group that will develop a one-day workshop evaluating the potential for social-natural science collaborations on several related questions:

• Is the spectrum of variability tilted toward rare but powerful events?
• How do variable conditions (freeze-thaw cycles, wet-dry cycles) change ecosystem feedbacks and human decision making?
• How much climate variability is internal to the climate system (El Niño) vs. externally caused (volcanic eruptions)?
• Some regions have inherently higher degrees of climate variability, and this variability may not match well to social resilience. How might policymakers assess and mitigate the risks associated with this mismatch?
• How do human perceptions of risk and variability affect their ability to respond effectively to a changing climate?

• Coastal Zones. Understanding the coupling between highly dynamic coastal ecosystems and human behavior and policy at the local scale is a major challenge. Heather Leslie, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and environmental studies is working with Linda Deegan, senior scientist in the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory, and Michael White, director of the Populations Studies and Training Center and professor of sociology, to develop a one-day workshop exploring how the distribution and behavior of coastal zone residents affects the functioning and resilience of coastal ecosystems.