Abstract We introduce the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES). This AI institute was funded in 2020 as part of a new initiative from the NSF to advance foundational AI research across a wide variety of domains. To date AI2ES is the only NSF AI institute focusing on environmental science applications. Our institute focuses on developing trustworthy AI methods for weather, climate, and coastal hazards. The AI methods will revolutionize our understanding and prediction of high-impact atmospheric and ocean science phenomena and will be utilized by diverse, professional user groups to reduce risks to society. In addition, we are creating novel educational paths, including a new degree program at a community college serving underrepresented minorities, to improve workforce diversity for both AI and environmental science.
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Concluding Remarks: Moving Forward on Scientific Knowledge and Management Approaches to Tropical Forests in the Anthropocene Epoch
The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service International Institute of Tropical Forestry (the Institute) celebrates its 75th Anniversary with the publication of this Special Issue of Forests. This Issue is based on presentations delivered in a symposium held in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2014. It augments a quarter century of scientific knowledge and capitalizes on a unique set of synergies chartered by a strategy based on shared stewardship, innovative transdisciplinary collaborations, and breakthroughs in science and technology. The manuscripts contained here present advancements in our approach to the development of policies for effective governance and stewardship, long-term focus for the understanding of ecosystem processes and functions, novelties given attention to cross-boundary collaborative approaches to science, and proposed alternative institutional visions in the Anthropocene. As the Institute continues to collaboratively explore new frontiers in science, we recognize advances in forestry, atmospheric sciences, modeling, hydrology, plant physiology, and microbial ecology as core to the understanding of tropical forests in the Anthropocene.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1831952
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10130137
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Forests
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 1999-4907
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 572
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The management of large common-pool resources, like fisheries and forests, is more difficult when more people and more communities can access them—a particular problem given increased population sizes, higher mobility and globalized trade in the Anthropocene. Social relationships spanning communities, such as kin relationships, business or trade relationships and friendships, can make management even more challenging by facilitating and transmitting norms of overharvesting. However, these long-distance relationships can also bolster management by transmitting norms for sustainability, promoting interdependence and laying the groundwork for nested management systems. Here, we review the negative and positive impacts of long-distance relationships on local natural resource management (NRM), providing illustrative examples from our field research on forest and fisheries management in Tanzania. Drawing on the evolutionary literature, the development literature and our field data, we offer suggestions for how development partners can avoid the pitfalls of long-distance relationships and how they can use or even deliberately foster long-distance relationships to promote successful local NRM. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis’.more » « less
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Summary Epiphytes and their associated biota are increasingly recognized as contributing to biodiversity and to filling critical ecosystem functions in world forests. However, the attributes that have made them successful in canopy environments also make them vulnerable to natural and human‐induced disturbances. Drawing upon ecological frameworks to understand disturbance, I categorized and synthesized the drivers and the consequences of disturbances on epiphytic materials. Across all impacts, disturbance agents were significantly more likely to lead to negative, rather than positive, effects in both tropical and temperate locales. Significantly more studies reported negative effects on abundance, diversity, community composition and connectivity, but some studies showed that disturbances enhanced these attributes. Although particular disturbance agents did not differently influence individual consequences, they explained a significant portion of variation in aggregated totals. Surprisingly, relative to human disturbances, natural disturbances were more likely to lead to negative effects. Many studies provided recommendations for effective societal responses to mitigate negative impacts, such as retaining large, old trees in forestry operations, patch‐clearing for epiphyte harvest, maximizing forest fragment size, using epiphytes as bioindicators of disturbance, and applying principles of community forestry to land management. Future actions should also include communication of these results to policymakers and land managers.
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/f10070572
