Alaska,
Utah and Wyoming are provided funding to bolster research capability and
address pressing state concerns
Three projects aimed at creating
world-class research resources and making them available to the academic
community recently received $60 million from the National Science Foundation's
(NSF) Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).
Representing a consortium of regional
institutions, each award recipient will receive $20 million over a five year
period in Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) Track-1 awards to bolster
science and engineering academic research infrastructure. The awards will go to
three states: Alaska, Utah and Wyoming.
"These RII awards provide resources
to fortify the physical, human and cyber infrastructure that lays the
groundwork for competitive research," said Denise Barnes, acting head of
NSF's EPSCoR program. "Each project is statewide in scope and rich in
complexity. Each blends the research talent of individual researchers,
institutions and organizations with the development of a diverse, STEM-enabled
workforce necessary to enhance and sustain research competitiveness and
catalyze knowledge-based economic development."
A brief description of the projects and
the lead institutions for the three awards are below.
ALASKA
- The University of Alaska (UA) Fairbanks
The Alaska Adapting to Changing
Environments (Alaska ACE) project, Alaska's fourth RII Track-1 award, will
examine how the pronounced changes in environmental and natural processes
affect and are affected by the adaptation strategies of Alaskan communities.
Three place-based studies in the
southeast, south-central and northern regions of Alaska seek to evaluate
vulnerabilities, resilience and adaptive capacities of Alaskan communities to
regional changes in landscape and water resources. Research will take place at the three main
campuses of the University of Alaska (UA) in the urban centers of Fairbanks,
Anchorage, and Juneau. In addition, research will take place in 13 satellite
campuses in rural areas across Alaska, a Tribal College, and at several learning
centers in small communities around the state.
Alaska ACE will advance
interdisciplinary research and translate research results into visualization
tools useful for researchers, local communities, resource managers and policy
makers. The project team will also examine extrapolation of the models of
community resilience and adaptation to other regions of the nation and world.
The program will train and educate a diverse set of students across Alaska,
including Native Alaskans, and strengthen partnerships with local communities,
businesses, government and non-government organizations.
UTAH
- Utah State University (USU)
The iUTAH project --innovative Urban
Transitions and Arid-region Hydro-sustainability--is Utah EPSCoR's first RII
Track-1 award. The project considers one of the most important problems facing
the western United States: the problem of current and future water provision
under climate change coupled with increasing demand for water on account of
urbanization. The research examines the fundamental interactions and dynamic
feedbacks among hydroclimate and the ecological and human aspects of urban and
montane landscapes.
Participants in the project include
researchers from seven institutions of higher education: Utah State University,
the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, Weber State University,
Southern Utah University, Utah Valley University and Westminster College of
Salt Lake City, as well as participants from business, government and the
citizenry of Utah.
iUTAH will identify how physical and
human systems interact to affect water supply, demand and management.
Investments in instrumentation, data collection, modeling and professional
expertise support the exploration and
evaluation of alternative water futures for Utah.
WYOMING
- University of Wyoming (UW)
This RII Track-1 award--the single
largest grant in the history of the University of Wyoming--will fund compelling
research addressing a pressing regional need: understanding water sources and
distribution in the arid Mountain West.
This funding seeks to enhance Wyoming's scientific research capability
by enabling a better understanding the mechanisms by which water is transformed
from precipitation (snow and rain) into river flow, groundwater recharge or
soil moisture and how these mechanisms respond to natural and human-made
changes.
The research will involve Wyoming's
community colleges, the Wind River Tribal College, the Arapaho Ranch, Jackson
State University in Mississippi and several federal, state and private business
partners.
This project focuses on developing a
multidisciplinary center for a comprehensive research program linking surface
and subsurface watershed hydrology, geophysics, remote sensing and
computational modeling, boosted by UW's association with the NCAR-Wyoming
Supercomputing Center that is nearing completion and slated to come on line
later this year.
The project supports water research in
areas of key importance to Wyoming, generating products and tools of use to
water resource managers charged with allocating scarce resources and
forecasting water deliveries in an environment of profound hydrological change.
Also included is a vigorous mentoring and recruitment effort to attract Native
American, Hispanic, African-American and female students, along with persons
with disabilities, to the state's science, technology, engineering and
mathematics workforce.
-NSF-
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