El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Enhances CO2 Exchange Rates in Freshwater Marsh Ecosystems in the Florida Everglades

This research examines the relationships between El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), water level, precipitation patterns and carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange rates in the freshwater wetland ecosystems of the Florida Everglades. Data was obtained over a 5-year study period (2009-2013) from two freshwater marsh sites located in Everglades National Park that differ in hydrology. At the short-hydroperiod site (Taylor Slough; TS) and the long-hydroperiod site (Shark River Slough; SRS) fluctuations in precipitation patterns occurred with changes in ENSO phase, suggesting that extreme ENSO phases alter Everglades hydrology which is known to have a substantial influence on ecosystem carbon dynamics. Variations in both ENSO phase and annual net CO2 exchange rates co-occurred with changes in wet and dry season length and intensity. Combined with site-specific seasonality in CO2 exchanges rates, El Nino and La Nina phases magnified season intensity and CO2 exchange rates at both sites. At TS, net CO2 uptake rates were higher in the dry season, whereas SRS had greater rates of carbon sequestration during the wet season. As La Nina phases were concurrent with drought years and extended dry seasons, TS became a greater sink for CO2 on an annual basis (-11 to -110 g CO2 m(-2) yr(-1)) compared to El Nino and neutral years (-5 to -43.5 g CO2 m(-2) yr(-1)). SRS was a small source for CO2 annually (1.81 to 80 g CO2 m(-2) yr(-1)) except in one exceptionally wet year that was associated with an El Nino phase (-16 g CO2 m(-2) yr(-1)). Considering that future climate predictions suggest a higher frequency and intensity in El Nino and La Nina phases, these results indicate that changes in extreme ENSO phases will significantly alter CO2 dynamics in the Florida Everglades

Steering Operational Synergies in Terrestrial Observation Networks: Opportunity for Advancing Earth System Dynamics Modelling

Advancing our understanding of Earth system dynamics (ESD) depends on the development of models and other analytical tools that apply physical, biological, and chemical data. This ambition to increase understanding and develop models of ESD based on site observations was the stimulus for creating the networks of Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER), Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs), and others. We organized a survey, the results of which identified pressing gaps in data availability from these networks, in particular for the future development and evaluation of models that represent ESD processes, and provide insights for improvement in both data collection and model integration. From this survey overview of data applications in the context of LTER and CZO research, we identified three challenges: (1) widen application of terrestrial observation network data in Earth system modelling, (2) develop integrated Earth system models that incorporate process representation and data of multiple disciplines, and (3) identify complementarity in measured variables and spatial extent, and promoting synergies in the existing observational networks. These challenges lead to perspectives and recommendations for an improved dialogue between the observation networks and the ESD modelling community, including co-location of sites in the existing networks and further formalizing these recommendations among these communities. Developing these synergies will enable cross-site and cross-network comparison and synthesis studies, which will help produce insights around organizing principles, classifications, and general rules of coupling processes with environmental conditions

Building a Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure to Address Global Grand Challenges for Macrosystem Ecology

The development of several large-, "continental"-scale ecosystem research infrastructures over recent decades has provided a unique opportunity in the history of ecological science. The Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI) is an integrated network of analogous, but independent, site-based ecosystem research infrastructures (ERI) dedicated to better understand the function and change of indicator ecosystems across global biomes. Bringing together these ERIs, harmonizing their respective data and reducing uncertainties enables broader cross-continental ecological research. It will also enhance the research community capabilities to address current and anticipate future global scale ecological challenges. Moreover, increasing the international capabilities of these ERIs goes beyond their original design intent, and is an unexpected added value of these large national investments. Here, we identify specific global grand challenge areas and research trends to advance the ecological frontiers across continents that can be addressed through the federation of these cross-continental-scale ERIs.Peer reviewe

Integrating data and analysis technologies within leading environmental research infrastructures: Challenges and approaches

When researchers analyze data, it typically requires significant effort in data preparation to make the data analysis ready. This often involves cleaning, pre-processing, harmonizing, or integrating data from one or multiple sources and placing them into a computational environment in a form suitable for analysis. Research infrastructures and their data repositories host data and make them available to researchers, but rarely offer a computational environment for data analysis. Published data are often persistently identified, but such identifiers resolve onto landing pages that must be (manually) navigated to identify how data are accessed. This navigation is typically challenging or impossible for machines. This paper surveys existing approaches for improving environmental data access to facilitate more rapid data analyses in computational environments, and thus contribute to a more seamless integration of data and analysis. By analysing current state-of-the-art approaches and solutions being implemented by world‑leading environmental research infrastructures, we highlight the existing practices to interface data repositories with computational environments and the challenges moving forward. We found that while the level of standardization has improved during recent years, it still is challenging for machines to discover and access data based on persistent identifiers. This is problematic in regard to the emerging requirements for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data, in general, and problematic for seamless integration of data and analysis, in particular. There are a number of promising approaches that would improve the state-of-the-art. A key approach presented here involves software libraries that streamline reading data and metadata into computational environments. We describe this approach in detail for two research infrastructures. We argue that the development and maintenance of specialized libraries for each RI and a range of programming languages used in data analysis does not scale well. Based on this observation, we propose a set of established standards and web practices that, if implemented by environmental research infrastructures, will enable the development of RI and programming language independent software libraries with much reduced effort required for library implementation and maintenance as well as considerably lower learning requirements on users. To catalyse such advancement, we propose a roadmap and key action points for technology harmonization among RIs that we argue will build the foundation for efficient and effective integration of data and analysis.This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreements No. 824068 (ENVRI-FAIR project) and No. 831558 (FAIR- sFAIR project). NEON is a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and managed under cooperative support agreement (EF-1029808) to Battell

Enabling FAIR research in Earth Science through research objects

Data-intensive science communities are progressively adopting FAIR practices that enhance the visibility of scientific breakthroughs and enable reuse. At the core of this movement, research objects contain and describe scientific information and resources in a way compliant with the FAIR principles and sustain the development of key infrastructure and tools. This paper provides an account of the challenges, experiences and solutions involved in the adoption of FAIR around research objects over several Earth Science disciplines. During this journey, our work has been comprehensive, with outcomes including: an extended research object model adapted to the needs of earth scientists; the provisioning of digital object identifiers (DOI) to enable persistent identification and to give due credit to authors; the generation of content-based, semantically rich, research object metadata through natural language processing, enhancing visibility and reuse through recommendation systems and third-party search engines; and various types of checklists that provide a compact representation of research object quality as a key enabler of scientific reuse. All these results have been integrated in ROHub, a platform that provides research object management functionality to a wealth of applications and interfaces across different scientific communities. To monitor and quantify the community uptake of research objects, we have defined indicators and obtained measures via ROHub that are also discussed herein.Published550-5645IT. Osservazioni satellitariJCR Journa

The Lack of Alignment among Environmental Research Infrastructures May Impede Scientific Opportunities

Faced with growing stakeholder attention to climate change-related societal impacts, Environmental Research Infrastructures (ERIs) find it difficult to engage beyond their initial user base, which calls for an overarching governance scheme and transnational synergies. Forced by the enormity of tackling climate change, ERIs are indeed broaching collaborative venues, based on the assumption that no given institution can carry out this agenda alone. While strategic, this requires that ERIs address the complexities and barriers towards aligning multiple organizations, national resources and programmatic cultures, including science

Integrating Environmental Science and the Economy: Innovative Partnerships between the Private Sector and Research Infrastructures

The present paper is a preliminary analysis of the funding, organizational culture, environmental, and innovation challenges that are currently faced by Environmental Research Infrastructures (ERI) and private enterprises working together. We contend there is a strong case for building creative collaboration models across these sectors that also require to new management tools to effectively generate economically-driven solutions to the global society at large in the face of climate change. To that end, public/private stakeholders that are likely to partner to address climate change also face new frontiers in how they will structurally and organizationally work together. We explore these issues around changing political, scientific, commercial environments; partnerships models; barriers in bridging these communities; and the role of formal project management processes. There is no one solution to fit all conditions that can bring together a specific public/private enterprise that incorporates a research infrastructure. However, we have provided two examples of collaborative models of public/private enterprises to highlight how these issues can be addressed, and to foster future dynamic and creative solutions to this problem

The Lack of Alignment among Environmental Research Infrastructures May Impede Scientific Opportunities

Faced with growing stakeholder attention to climate change-related societal impacts, Environmental Research Infrastructures (ERIs) find it difficult to engage beyond their initial user base, which calls for an overarching governance scheme and transnational synergies. Forced by the enormity of tackling climate change, ERIs are indeed broaching collaborative venues, based on the assumption that no given institution can carry out this agenda alone. While strategic, this requires that ERIs address the complexities and barriers towards aligning multiple organizations, national resources and programmatic cultures, including science

Integrating environmental science and the economy: innovative partnerships between the private sector and research infrastructures

The present paper is a preliminary analysis of the funding, organizational culture, environmental and innovation challenges that are currently faced by Environmental Research Infrastructures (ERI) and private enterprises working together. We contend there is a strong case for building creative collaboration models across these sectors that also require to new management tools to effectively generate economically-driven solutions to the global society at large in the face of climate change. To that end, public/private stakeholders that are likely to partner to address climate change also face new frontiers in how they will structurally and organizationally work together. We explore these issues around changing political, scientific, commercial environments; partnerships models; barriers in bridging these communities; and the role of formal project management processes. There is no one solution to fit all conditions that can bring together a specific public / private enterprise that incorporates a research infrastructure. However, we have provided two examples of collaborative models of public/private enterprises to highlight how these issues can be addressed, and to foster future dynamic and creative solutions to this problem