Rapid Assessment of Recent Changes in Land Cover and Carbon Balance in Beringia.

• Investigators: Patrick J. Webber, Craig E. Tweedie
• Funding Agency: US National Science Foundation ANS0454997
• Project Length: April 2005 – March 2009
• SEL Participants: David Lin
• Web sites with more information on this project: www.baidims.org.

Summary:

Intellectual Merit: This project assesses decadal time scale changes in ecosystem structure and function throughout the Beringia region and supports US involvement in the Swedish Beringia 2005 Expedition.Recent and persistent changes in climate and human land use in the Beringia region of north eastern Russia and Alaska are amongst most dramatic on the globe. Significant stores of global soil organic carbon exist in this region and understanding how changes in ecosystem productivity interact and potentially offset the balance and stability of the Arctic soil carbon reservoir is of utmost importance to global change science. Net losses of carbon to the atmosphere as CO2 and CH4 could enhance greenhouse warming.

The close coupling of physical and biological processes in Arctic terrestrial ecosystems is well founded and subtle changes in biodiversity and land cover can cause important and detectable shifts in ecosystem function. Land cover change represents a time-integrated response and shift in the competitive interaction between species responding to an altered biological, chemical and/or physical state. Thus, given adequate verification and validation, land cover change, shifts in plot based biodiversity and other ecosystem structural components can be used as indicators of change in ecosystem carbon balance. The key objective of this project is to provide a rapid assessment of the patterns of decadal time scale land cover change at multiple sites in the Beringia region and gauge the probable impact these changes have had on ecosystem carbon balance.

This project is made possible by our participation in the Swedish Beringia 2005 Expedition. Leg 2A of this expedition focuses on research related to the biocomplexity of Beringian terrestrial ecosystems and uses the Swedish icebreaker Oden to transit study sites between Pevek (Chukotka) and Barrow (Alaska). Land cover change will be assessed at the plot level in collaboration with a Russian colleague who established marked plots throughout the region between 1984 and 1986. At the landscape level, land cover change will be assessed using modern high-spatial resolution satellite imagery to derive supervised land cover classifications that will be compared to land cover maps derived from newly archived historical air photos and/or recently declassified military spy imagery. Component land-atmosphere fluxes of CO2 and CH4 will be measured in collaboration with a Swedish colleague in multiple land cover types at each site visited. Component fluxes will be extrapolated to the landscape level for each multi-temporal land cover assessment and the probable changes in carbon balance will be interpolated. Monolith, soil, and vegetation samples will be collected for controlled laboratory experiments and analyses that will enable cross-site comparison of a range of biogeochemical processes.

 Broader Impacts: This 3-year project will maintain a continued field presence by the investigative team and support numerous established and developing national and international programs and collaborations including the International Polar Year of 2007-08. Postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students will work directly on project activities and numerous international educational and community outreach activities affiliated with the expedition and ongoing in northern Alaska will be benefited. Research findings will be presented at national and international meetings and documented in peer review journals. Data will be made available to expedition personnel and archived at internationally recognized data centers according to NSF OPP data archiving policy. Spatially oriented data products will be added to our interactive web-based mapping and informational applications that are partnered to the developing ArcticGIS initiative and the terrestrial Circum-arctic Environmental Observatories Network (CEON). These applications can be viewed at www.baidims.org and www.ceoninfo.org. The bi-polar comparison component of an Earth and Antarctic System Science field courses taught by the PIs will also be enhanced.