NSF Grant to Explore Coastal Temperate Rainforests

Written by

This February, Professor David Butman was part of a research team awarded a $500,000, four-year grant through the National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network. The goal of the grant is to develop a research collaborative, organized as the Coastal Rainforest Margins Research Network, to study the flux of materials from coastal watersheds to nearshore marine ecosystems in Pacific coastal temperate rainforests (PCTR).

2016_03_Butman1
One of the exciting possibilities of this grant, says Butman, is the potential to create foundations for larger projects in the future, including with the Olympic Natural Resources Center and Olympic Experimental State Forest.

Butman is a co-PI on the grant with two researchers from the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. Through a series of workshops and other collaborations, they will be working to quantify what’s happening now in coastal temperate rainforest ecosystems, identify critical areas of future research—especially related to a changing climate—and build an international community of scientists in similar zones around the world, including in Patagonia and New Zealand.

It’s a higher-level project, says Butman, designed to figure out what still needs to be done—data and concepts at the cusp of current science—to understand the connectivity between land, freshwater and coastal systems.

This grant targets PCTR ecosystems from coastal Oregon and Washington up through southwest Alaska. These ecosystems encompass the largest coastal temperate rainforests in the world, and they include the most extensive remaining old-growth forests in North America. They also experience tremendous freshwater flux and run-off, so understanding how carbon moves through these dynamic coastal margins is a huge part of this research—and a primary focus of Butman’s role on the grant.

“This region gets more water and rain per unit area than anywhere else,” he says. “Essentially from the Olympic Peninsula up through southwest Alaska, the area sees more than six times the annual output of the Yukon River, or three times the Mississippi. So much material moves from the land to the ocean here, so it’s an exciting opportunity.”

2016_03_Butman2
An important component of this research includes studying how warming temperatures and changing weather patterns will impact the long-term health of these dynamic coastal temperate rainforests.

The grant includes funding for four workshops, and Butman will be organizing the first this coming fall. It will focus on biogeochemical cycling, and he is currently reaching out to potential stakeholders and participants, from native communities to other scientists and natural resource managers.

Other major research questions the network will be addressing include: What are current freshwater and carbon fluxes in the PCTR, and how will these be affected by future changes in climate? How do forest communities, distribution and disturbance regimes drive current land-to-ocean biogeochemical fluxes across the PCTR, and how will climate-driven changes affect this flux? What is the relative importance of terrestrially derived materials transport for regulating marine ecosystem processes in the PCTR, and how will marine ecosystems respond to altered terrestrial biogeochemical fluxes? Is the PCTR a future source or sink of carbon under a changing climate, and can the insights gained about ecosystem processes in the PCTR translate to other coastal temperate rainforests? And what is the current and future contribution of coastal temperate rainforests to continental or global estimates of carbon sequestration and material fluxes across the terrestrial/marine interface?

Previous studies have explored some of these questions in parts or certain places, but the key with this broad collaborative is to organize a concerted effort to address information gaps and connect the dots—and to use this region as a model for understanding ecological processes in similar ecosystems around the world.

Photos © David Butman.

SEFS Involved in Four Major NASA Grants

Written by

As part of its Terrestrial Ecology Program, NASA recently launched the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE). It’s a major field campaign in Alaska and western Canada—starting this year, and lasting 8 to 10 years—with the goal of better understanding the vulnerability and resilience of ecosystems and society to a changing climate in Arctic and boreal regions. In 2015, NASA awarded grants to 21 projects as part this campaign, and four of the proposals involve researchers at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS)!

A Dall sheep ram.
Dall sheep ram.

New faculty member Laura Prugh had two proposals funded, including one as the principal investigator (PI) and another as a co-PI. The first, “Assessing alpine ecosystem vulnerability to environmental change using Dall sheep as an iconic indicator species,” will involve synthesis and modeling of Dall sheep population and movement data throughout their range, developing new remote sensing layers of snow characteristics, and conducting fieldwork in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. The research will be funded for $1 million over four years.

The second project, “Animals on the move: Remotely based determination of key drivers influencing movements and habitat selection of highly mobile fauna throughout the ABoVE study domain,” will synthesize and model movements of moose, caribou, wolves and grizzly bears throughout Alaska and western Canada. Prugh’s role in this research will be to model the wolf and bear movements, and there is a $200,000 sub-award in the grant for her to hire a postdoc for two years to lead that work.

Professor David Butman is a co-PI on a third proposal, “Vulnerability of inland waters and the aquatic carbon cycle to changing permafrost and climate across boreal northwestern North America,” that focuses on changes to carbon biogeochemistry in lakes as a result of thawing permafrost. Specifically, the project aims to evaluate potential impacts in boreal and Arctic regions as permafrost thaw, climate warming and fire change the “plumbing” that controls water movement and distribution. The total award for this proposal is around $2.1 million, with $1.2 million coming from NASA and the other $900,000 coming from the U.S. Geological Survey. Of that total amount, around $110,000 will come to SEFS from NASA to fund a student for two years, and $30,000 will come from the USGS for summer support for Professor Butman.

The fourth SEFS project involves co-PI Hans-Erik Andersen, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station and an affiliate professor with SEFS. This proposal, “Fingerprinting Three Decades of Changes in Interior Alaska (1982-2014) Using Field Measurements, Stereo Air Photos, and G-LiHT Data,” will explore changes in vegetation cover and composition over time to characterize the vulnerability and likely future trajectories of these landscapes under projected warming and scenarios of future disturbances. The project is funded at $334,564 over three years.

To have nearly 20 percent of the funded proposals in 2015 involve SEFS is a fairly remarkable percentage, and we’re excited to see how these projects progress!

Photo by © Steve Arthur.

Notes from the Field: Helicopter Sampling in Alaska

Written by

Earlier this week, Professor David Butman returned from spending 11 days in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, where he had the memorable opportunity to conduct his field sampling by helicopter and float plane. He was able to coordinate the trip on a shoestring budget, as well, thanks to a great partnership with NASA and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, the U.S. Geological Survey, and Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington (where Butman holds a joint appointment).

Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

Professor Butman’s research involves measuring fluxes of carbon dioxide and methane in water systems—especially in Arctic and boreal ecosystems—and how those releases of greenhouse gasses are impacting the global carbon cycle and climate change. At a conference two years ago, he connected with Professor Tamlin Pavelsky, a hydrologist at the University of North Carolina’s Department of Geological Sciences. They stayed in touch and kept talking about potential collaborations, and their interests eventually aligned over an engineering project in Alaska.

Pavelsky has been helping with field calibration for a new radar sensor that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is planning to launch on a satellite in 2020. Through its Surface Water and Ocean Topography, or SWOT, mission, NASA is developing this sensor to observe changes in water level to within a millimeter of accuracy, which will have important applications for measuring water volume in lakes and rivers, as well as impacts of flooding.

Daylight extended until nearly midnight, giving them incredibly long days to collect samples. “You lose track of time,” says Butman, taking a “sampling selfie” here.
Daylight extended until nearly midnight, giving them incredibly long days to collect samples. “You lose track of time,” says Butman (taking a “sampling selfie” here).

Right now, they’re in the middle of an intense campaign to calibrate the radar sensor and test it by flying over different landforms and water features. So when Butman learned from Pavelsky that some of those test sites would include the Yukon Flats, he pitched the idea of tagging along to conduct his own biogeochemistry measurements at the same time. He had already marked some of those same areas for future sampling, and the timing was perfect to draw different programs together for common goals. NASA agreed to bring him along, and they ended up covering the expense of the helicopter and plane flights in Alaska, and Butman handled the equipment and labor.

He seized the opportunity and spent 16 to 17 hours in the field on the trip. Butman flew around with a pilot and a student technician to assist him, locating lakes from the air and heading down to take measurements. Assisted by Alaska’s endless summer sunshine, they were able to collect tons of data from 18 different lakes. “It was kind of exciting,” he says. “Some of these systems have never been measured.”

Butman has another proposal in with NASA to fund continued research in the Yukon area, and he definitely hopes to get back up there next year. “It was one of my top three field experiences so far, for sure.”

Photos © David Butman.

2015_06_Butman3

Humans Adding ‘Fossil’ Carbon to Rivers

Written by

Though soil has often been considered a reliable long-term carbon sink, new research suggests that the effects of human land-use choices—from urbanization to agricultural intensification and deforestation—are reducing how much carbon is actually stored in the ground, says Professor David Butman, lead author on a paper just published in Nature Geoscience, “Increased mobilization of aged carbon to rivers by human disturbance.”

Professor David Butman
Professor David Butman

Professor Butman is a new faculty member with the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS) who holds a joint appointment with Civil and Environmental Engineering. He began this research in 2011 as an offshoot of his doctoral work at Yale University involving 13 major river basins in the United States. Starting from a trend he discovered in that initial data, Butman and his co-authors expanded the scope with direct sampling of aquatic carbon at a number of field sites around the world, and also combed the literature for other relevant studies, tracking down researchers whenever possible to verify data. The resulting study range covers 84 degrees of latitude from the Arctic to tropical ecosystems, providing a comprehensive, global data set of radiocarbon ages of riverine dissolved organic carbon, coupled with spatial data on land cover, population and environmental variables.

From exploring this data, Butman and his co-authors were able to determine how carbon isotopes of organic matter in rivers can show the impact of land cover disturbances—specifically, the release of ‘old’ carbon into the modern carbon cycle, analogous to the burning of fossil fuels. Most dissolved organic carbon in rivers originates from young organic carbon from soils and vegetation, but the results of this study suggest that 3.2 to 8.9 percent of that dissolved organic carbon is actually aged carbon that human disturbances have churned back into the system.

What that means, says Butman, is that the release of carbon through land use and land cover change has been undercounted in previous estimates of anthropogenic carbon emissions. The full impact of this increase on the global carbon cycle is not entirely clear yet, but it definitely means we’re reducing how much carbon is being stored in the land purely through how we manipulate and change the physical surface of the planet.

Check out the full results and conclusions in the paper, and contact Professor Butman if you have any questions about this research or his other projects!

Photo © David Butman.

New Faculty Intro: David Butman

Written by

Professor David Butman, one of three new faculty members with the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS), has been on campus a few weeks now, and he and his family are settling into their new city and neighborhood in Maple Leaf. Like Professor Patrick Tobin, who relocated from West Virginia, Professor Butman comes to us from across the country at Yale University, where he was working as a postdoctoral associate.

David Butman
Perhaps the easiest part about moving across the country to Seattle? Butman, who grew up in a fishing community, will still have tremendous access to water!

New England has been home to Butman for most of his life. He grew up in the historical fishing community of Gloucester, Mass., where most of his family still lives. (His first job out of undergrad, in fact, was working on a commercial fishing boat as an observer with the National Marine Fisheries Service to monitor bycatch for the Marine Mammal Protection Act.) He earned a bachelor’s in economics and environmental studies from Connecticut College, a master’s in environmental science from Yale, and then his Ph.D. in forestry and environmental studies from Yale in 2011.

Switching oceans and coasts, Butman joins us as part of a cluster hire in freshwater science, and he holds a joint professorship with Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and SEFS—though his office is based in our school. The vision for the Freshwater Initiative involves interdisciplinary collaboration across a number of programs and units in the College of the Environment, including CEE and SEFS, as well as the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and UW Tacoma. Among the initiative’s research themes are ecohydrology, watershed ecology and river restoration, fluvial geomorphology, urban water quality, aquatic biogeochemistry and continental hydrology.

David Butman
Butman already has a few projects in the works, including a collaboration with Professor Christian Torgersen out on the Olympic Peninsula.

As part of this broader freshwater research portfolio, Butman brings a strong background in aquatic biogeochemistry and remote sensing, including the application of new sensors to monitor the environment. He studies the influence of humans and climate on carbon cycling at the intersection of terrestrial and aquatic systems. Specifically, he measures the capacity of ecosystems to change as a result of anthropogenic carbon emissions; human landscape alteration, like logging or development; and the effects of climate change, in order to identify environmental stressors within watersheds and mitigate long-term resource degradation.

Butman already has a few projects ramping up, including one down on the Columbia River to measure carbon cycling around The Dalles Dam. He’s been working closely with the Army Corps of Engineers, and he’s looking to expand the project and do more field work over the next couple summers. Also, in collaboration with Professor Christian Torgersen, he’s secured funding for a student to do carbon sampling in the Sol Duc River out on the Olympic Peninsula.

As he gets his research and lab up and running, Butman will likely start teaching this winter or spring, including the possibility of a remote sensing survey course. We’re extremely excited to have him and his expertise as part of the SEFS community, and we hope you’ll introduce yourselves as soon as you can. You can reach Butman by email or stop by his office in BLD 264 (though we’re still working on his nameplate!).

Welcome, David!

Photos © David Butman.

David Butman