NSF awards $20 million for five-year research project
July 17, 2012
A new $20 million National Science Foundation grant to the University of Alaska Fairbanks
will support interdisciplinary research throughout the state of Alaska.
The award to the Alaska Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, which
is housed at UAF, will support a five-year research project, Alaska Adapting to Changing
Environments or Alaska ACE.
The project will conduct biological, physical and social research into Alaska communities’
adaptive capacity: the mechanisms that enable communities to effectively respond to
environmental and social changes.
“Alaska is made up of a diverse array of social and ecological systems that are undergoing
dramatic environmental change,” said UAF anthropology professor Peter Schweitzer,
the principal investigator of the award. “Alaska is the ideal place to study the ways
different types of communities adapt to these changes.”
The project will involve 19 core university researchers and will hire eight more.
More than 20 additional researchers will participate in the project in some way. Researchers
come from a variety of physical, biological and social science disciplines.
The university is a national leader in developing the tools and methods need to understand
and inform adaption, said Lilian Alessa, a University of Alaska Anchorage biology
professor who is serving as a co-principal investigator of the project. “Alaska ACE
will continue to set the trend by advancing our knowledge of social dynamics in changing
environments, as well as help provide decision support for Alaska’s sustainable future.”
Alaska ACE research will be organized around three regional test cases: the Southcentral
Alaska test case will examine the effects of land cover and precipitation changes
on fisheries and tourism in the Kenai River watershed. The Northern Alaska case will
study how permafrost thaw and land cover change affect subsistence resources around
four Interior and arctic villages. The Southeast Alaska test case will focus on changes
to ecosystem services brought on by glacial recession near the Juneau area.
“The test cases strive to build UA’s research capacity to address multifaceted issues
and signify a better balance in its approach to integrating research efforts,” said
Sanjay Pyare, an associate professor of geography at the University of Alaska Southeast
and the other co-principal investigator. “Rather than organize these cases along disciplinary
lines, each case is rooted in geographically relevant social-ecological phenomena.”
A statewide working group will use the results from the test cases to answer larger
scientific questions about adaptation and to create tools for land and resource managers.
In addition to these research efforts, a significant portion of the funding will go
toward education, outreach and diversity efforts designed to better engage the public
in science.
UAF Vice Chancellor for Research Mark Myers and Alessa will serve as co-directors
of the project, while Pips Veazey of UAF will serve as project administrator.
The award comes through the NSF’s EPSCoR program, which was established by Congress
to distribute research awards to areas of the country that have traditionally received
smaller amounts of federal research funding. Thirty-one states and territories now
receive or are eligible for EPSCoR funds.
ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Pips Veazey, adveazey@alaska.edu, 907-474-5989. Peter Schweitzer,
ppschweitzer@alaska.edu, 907-474-5015