Director's Statement

 

What a year it has been for Earth System Science.  Al Gore has won an Oscar for his movie documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”  The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a fourth assessment report providing a clear scientific appraisal that the Earth’s climate is changing and it is highly likely that many of these changes can be attributed to humankind. This has created an awareness of the potential issues of global change throughout society.  We, as scientists, are often asked, “Is it true?” by our neighbors, family and friends.  This rising awareness has made it clear that we, as a nation and a member of the global society, need to increase our commitment to the sciences if we are to address and potentially mitigate the many challenges of climate and environmental change.  This commitment to understanding the coupled Earth system on regional to global scales is the focus of the scientists and graduate students at ICESS.  ICESS researchers work across the spectrum of the Earth System Sciences, from extreme events to biodiversity to economic impacts, increasing our understanding of global environmental changes and assessing their impacts on the Earth and society. 

 

Unfortunately, commitment from the federal government has lagged behind society’s awareness and for the past several years extramural funding in global environmental change has been diminishing.  It is a testament to the quality of the researchers at ICESS that this year new awards to ICESS participants have reached an all time high.  Research funding for this year has increased by 50% over the prior fiscal year which represents an increase of 21% above our ten-year average.  I believe that this trend is going to continue.   I noted in my last report that I was very concerned with the directions that NASA had been taking where no significant investments were being made to continue our ability to observe and understand the global system from satellite orbit (and with it the lack of commitment to support research using the satellite data sets we have).  This lack of continuity in satellite coverage will have a large impact on our ability to assess and respond, as a society, to the global environmental changes that are taking place.  This year, a National Research Council (NRC) committee completed the first Decadal Survey for Earth Science and Applications from Space which outlines planned satellite observations for the next twenty years.  In the space sciences, decadal surveys have long been the blueprint for how national assets will be invested in scientific missions while planning for the Earth Sciences has historically been piecemeal (a mission at a time).  I have been told that the NASA Earth Science Directorate will follow the exact recommendations made by the NRC’s Earth Science Decadal Survey.  This decision to build back the U.S. constellation of Earth observing satellites is one of the most positive announcements the Earth System Science community has heard in years.    

 

This good news does not mean that there are not now data gaps in our ability to understand the Earth system from satellite orbit.  One of the major data gaps currently is the lack of consistent, high spatial resolution imagery from Landsat, which has long been used to understand land surface processes.  Researchers at UCSB and throughout the U.S. are faced with the challenge of how to answer pressing global change questions without the data sets to do so.  To alleviate this data gap, ICESS has partnered with a local company, Terra Image, USA, to offer SPOT satellite imagery to U.S. educational researchers (see www.spot.ucsb.edu).  This new program, SPOT at UCSB, builds on our internal program that was launched in June, 2005, which provides UCSB researchers and students with nearly unlimited access to high spatial resolution commercial satellite imagery from the SPOT constellation of satellite sensors. These data are commercial products and have previously been inaccessible to academic researchers due to their high cost.  Because of our efforts, U.S. researchers can now acquire high spatial resolution scenes comparable to aerial photography, allowing one to study agriculture, coastal, forestry, geology, hydrology, land use, urban, hazards, and the impacts people make on the Earth.  To date, we have archived over 76,400 scenes, occupying 16 Terabytes, with a retail value of over $230-million.  These scenes have benefited participants from ICESS, Geography, the Bren School, Chemistry, ECE, EEMB, Environmental Studies, Earth Sciences, the Institute for Crustal Studies, IQCD, MSI, NCEAS, and Physics.  New science grants building on the internal SPOT program have been received by both ICESS and MSI. For their continued support of both the internal and SPOT at UCSB programs, I thank Business Services, Administrative Services, the Office of the Dean of Science, and the Office of Research.

 

Research at ICESS continues to make strong contributions to science as demonstrated by the scope of the publication records of our participants.  Catherine Gautier, Professor of Geography and the former Director, has completed two major books this year that will be published by Cambridge Press.  The first will be published in French and English under the title: “Facing climate change together.” Her other book is an “Introduction to Oil, Water and Climate.”  My group has been very busy this past year.  We have contributed to a paper in Science demonstrating that the amount of carbon that the ocean can export via sinking particles to depth and effectively sequester over long time scales depends on structure functioning of the biological communities that produce the organic carbon in the upper ocean.  In a paper in Nature we showed that the productivity of much of the global ocean biosphere will respond directly to the warming of the world's oceans resulting in lower global ocean productivity due to global warming.  Norm Nelson, an Associate Researcher, published a paper illustrating the distribution and geochemistry of the optically-active fraction of dissolved organic matter in the ocean – a significant but little-studied component of the global carbon cycle.  In this paper, he has put to rest the controversy that colored dissolved organic matter is the result of runoff from land surfaces.  Finally, Chris Costello, a faculty member at the Bren School, has recently published an economic analysis of optimal spatial management of a fishery.  He and his colleague Steve Polasky of the University of Minnesota find that if there is spatial heterogeneity in fish production or recruitment success that closing regions, instituting no-take marine reserves, will optimize long-term net profits to the fishery.  Theirs is the first economic results that show that marine reserves are part of an optimal fishery management solution. 

 

As always, students are involved in research at ICESS at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.  Five of our graduate students are funded on fellowships managed at ICESS.  Undergraduates participate in field campaigns both on and off-shore, assist in data analysis, and apply the lessons learned in the classroom to scientific problems.  Graduate students actively participate in every area of research within ICESS from hydrology to looking at marine protected areas to evaluating our country’s conservation priorities based on each state’s views of social goals, biological status and trends, threats and opportunities.  The breadth of student research is wide and their contribution is considerable.

 

In reviewing the ICESS Director’s Statements and Advisory Committee reports for the past decade, each has addressed our budget shortfall and significant staffing issues.  This is an on-going problem throughout campus that has yet to be corrected.  As with prior reports, I continue to urge the UCSB administration to work with UCOP to mitigate the staffing issues faced by our campus.  The expertise and dedication of the ICESS staff allows our researchers to focus on science with the knowledge that administrative and computing infrastructure functions will be managed by the team.  I thank each of them again this year for their contribution to our success.

 

As an Organized Research Unit at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the ICESS mission continues to be "to provide a distributed, interdisciplinary computer environment for the promotion and support of research and research education in Earth system science, an interdisciplinary environment and computer-related service that enhances the excellence and competitive advantage of UCSB global change research, a center of excellence to provide visibility and aid in the attraction of top faculty and students to UCSB, and an efficiently-run business operations and administration that supports research."

 

This was an excellent year for ICESS – record extramural funding, notification by NASA that all four of our EOS renewal proposals will be funded, news that NASA intends to follow the NRC recommendations, and the launch of an external program that will bring SPOT satellite imagery to U.S. educational institutions.  It was a busy and productive year that brought many advances toward ICESS goals.  This next year brings our external review; a chance to focus on where we are in the Earth Science community and where we want to be in the coming years.  Although the effort to complete the review will be significant, I look forward to the opportunity of holding these discussions with our participants and working to determine our future.

                                     

                                    David A. Siegel, Director