I-GUIDE Sessions at AGU 2022

Posted 2 years ago

Find I-GUIDE at the American Geophysical Union in December 2022!  These are some of the sessions where our team members will be presenting their activities:

 

IN32A – Harnessing the Geospatial Data Revolution to Advance Sustainability Science

Many sustainability challenges, including for example biodiversity loss, and food and water insecurity, among others, are interdependent across space and over time. Tackling these challenges, as a geospatial data deluge permeates broad scientific and societal realms, requires transformative understanding of the complex interactions between driving processes and local sustainability stresses across the full range of spatial, temporal, and domain-specific scales. How to harness geospatial data for multi-scale discoveries aimed at the sustainable development goals is a grand challenge. Conventional scientific approaches tend to be fragmented in space and time, and too frequently they fail to extend beyond siloed domains. These limitations preclude the full and informed use of complex geospatial data, making multi-scale inference and prediction difficult or infeasible. This session invites submissions that address how to holistically integrate heterogeneous geospatial data, innovative artificial intelligence and data science approaches, and domain-specific models with computational reproducibility to advance sustainability science.

Conveners from I-GUIDE:

H23A-01 – The Co-evolution of Humans, Climate, Water, Earth and Biota: The Next Chapter?

The 2022 Walter B. Langbein Lecture, by Professor Upmanu Lall, Columbia University. The Walter Langbein Lecture is presented annually and recognizes lifetime contributions of a senior scientist to the science of hydrology or unselfish cooperation in hydrologic research. The award is named to honor the life and work of hydrologist Walter B. Langbein.

For over 100,000 years, humans have inhabited the earth. Over that time, we have evolved from a migratory species that relied on what was available, marveling at the range of biota as we wandered, to unprecedented global domination, modifying climate, water and land, and escaping the tug of earth’s gravity to leave our signature on another planet. Hydrology must occupy a special place in this evolution since human dependence on water is explicit, and this constrains our search for a place to live beyond our planet.

The hydrologic cycle – from glaciers to ocean to atmosphere and land – is a critical element of the planetary energy dynamics and climate. Rivers on land, in the atmosphere and currents in the ocean distribute energy, man-made chemicals, and microbes to all parts of the planet. Consequently, it is interesting that hydrologic science is largely insulated from a sense of the coupled dynamics of man, climate and water, especially as to the millennial time scales of evolution. Yes, we consider the near term dynamics of harnessing water for designing infrastructure for supply or to tame the fury of floods, or to understand how we are changing the quantity and quality of water. Infrastructure that insulates man from climate exigencies that are felt through water has to an extent decoupled human thinking and evolution from water – until it fails. Man’s modification of climate extends to the hydrologic cycle, which in turn is critical for biota, and hence the carbon cycle, and may soon be responsible for mass, forced human migration. These aspects are now topics of study.

This talk will focus on the question of how we may co-evolve over the next 100 to 1000 years, and perhaps longer. What can we expect from humans? Are they agents that shape the planet to their will, or does nature re-assert herself, and what role will water play in this game? Does the coupling break as technology enables the exploration of other planets?

 

ED22B – Education and Workforce Development for Convergence and Data Sciences in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

We are witnessing unprecedented advances and increased applications of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data sciences in all areas of science and society and are facing a critical need for professionals with expertise in data and information technologies, along with domain knowledge. Academia has begun producing and modifying curriculum to include enhanced training in AI/ML and data science so that students graduate with the requisite skills, literacies, and competencies. This session welcomes contributions from thought leaders and practitioners in multiple earth sciences disciplines and information science to discuss challenges, opportunities and best practices for educators, learners, and researchers to create a workforce for advancing convergence science. The proposed session will be of interest to several AGU sections, including but not limited to Atmospheric Sciences, Hydrology, Education, and Earth and Space Science Informatics.

Conveners from I-GUIDE:

 

GC521 – Global-Local-Global Analysis of Sustainability and the Telecoupling of Land and Water Systems II

Global change drivers, including population, income, technology, and trade, are placing increasing stress on local land and water systems across an interconnected world. These sustainability stresses vary by locality, due to heterogeneity in governance, culture, climate, hydrology, soils, and socio-economic practices. Furthermore, these localities can be telecoupled (environmentally and socioeconomically interconnected) to other systems around the world through flows between these systems, such as the movement of people, goods, and information. Through these flows, local stress responses can influence distant systems, and can feed back to regional and global systems through markets and biophysical spillovers. Therefore, analysis of sustainability solutions must embrace methodologies capable of examining connections across systems and scales. This session will include presentations by members of the NSF-funded GLASSNET project, as well as other scientists contributing to use cases and analyses of connected land and water systems, such as global-to-local-to-global methodologies and the telecoupling framework.

Conveners from I-GUIDE:

 

GC521-0252 – Evaluating Cascading Disaster Impacts Through the Telecoupling Framework: a Case Study Using Midwest Drought and the Cerrado of Brazil

In an interconnected world, disaster impacts can cascade across coupled human-natural systems. Yet, these impacts are generally assessed only in the area in which the disaster directly occurred. The telecoupling framework provides a method for understanding the complex connections within a system (e.g., area where a disaster occurs) and between distant systems. Here, we use the telecoupling framework to analyze the impacts of a major drought across the US Midwest on the Cerrado of Brazil by evaluating the agents, causes, and effects in each system and the flows between systems. The Midwest and Brazil are top exporters of soybeans, so, despite their distance, a major disaster in the Midwest could decrease domestic soybean production and give a competitive advantage to Brazil. This could drive land conversion in Brazil’s soybean frontier located across the Cerrado, a region considered the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna. By combining the telecoupling framework with geospatial and time-series analysis of deforestation and drought, we will show how this work can expand current cascading disaster research by explicitly linking the impacts within systems and between distant systems.

Conveners from I-GUIDE

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