A team led by Boston University Marine Program (BUMP) Professors Les Kaufman (Biology) and Suchi Gopal (Earth & Environment) recently received two grants to apply their research modeling methods and visioning tools that examine how the human and natural world interact to help address pressing problems in conservation and economic sustainability.
Kaufman and Gopal’s team was awarded $2 million of a larger multi-institutional $20 million NSF grant to support their research on systems to ensure safety the safety of people who live along warm water coastlines and are exposed to hazards such as hurricanes, storm surges, and death of coral reefs. The work is an outgrowth of earlier research supported by the Herbert W. Hoover Foundation, and the Pew Marine Fellows Program.
The larger NSF grant, which brings together the BU team with partners at the University of South Florida and elsewhere, focuses on tropical coastal sustainability within coastal communities in Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Belize, looking at interactions and interrelationships between different people and parts of the ecosystem, in light of climate change. Researchers will collaborate on ecosystem-based processes that can help mitigate risk and provide solutions. Gopal is the education director of the project.
Kaufman and Gopal’s team was also awarded a second contract of $1.7 million for use over three years from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), in collaboration with the Blue Water Research Institute and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The award is to study the environmental and social impacts of BOEM’s activities on the outer continental shelf, beginning with offshore wind energy. The project will help determine the environmental effect of offshore wind farms on marine life and other human activities when wind pylons are anchored deep into the sea.
The mission of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is to manage development of the US offshore energy and mineral resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way. The BU team aims to develop a national ecosystem-based management framework for BOEM’s decision-making process regarding this renewal energy development. The team will test the framework by building and monitoring wind fields in the Gulf of Maine, and upon success of this step, will replicate the framework in a secondary region.
The research group uses the Multi-scale Integrated Model of Ecosystem Services (MIMES), an integrated suite of models designed by Roel Boumans (a longtime collaborator on these projects) from his sustainable farm in Vermont. MIMES simulates the tradeoffs inherent in the simultaneous production of and demands upon multiple ecosystem goods and services across spatial and temporal scales. The U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit now features MIMES. The group also uses a decision tool called Marine Integrated Decision Analysis System (MIDAS) that Gopal and Josh Pitts developed as a graphic user interface and portal to present MIMES simulation and other results. Pitts emphasizes that “decision-useful tools have to facilitate complex tradeoffs.”
The team approaches the problem from two angles, one driven by theory and one by data. Dr. Roelof Boumans leads the theory-driven modeling, while Dr. Deyle leads the data-driven modeling. “On the one hand, we’re taking everything we’ve learned so far about the human and natural ecosystem to model the complex outcomes,” said Deyle “but there is so much we still don’t know, and so we’re also trying to learn as much as possible about those complex tradeoffs directly from the data.”
“This project will give BU students a great opportunity to use geospatial data and analysis in EBM coastal modeling,” Gopal added. “They have a front-row seat when it comes to modeling offshore wind energy, commercial fishing, and biodiversity conservation.” Deyle will be using the contract as a springboard for student projects in his Quantitative Fisheries Analysis course this fall.
Both grant-funded projects are part of the BU research group CHANS (coupled human and natural systems), which conducts research under the common goal to “deepen the understanding of the relationship between society and nature, and then to apply this to problems in conservation and economic sustainability.”
“We have been laboring for a quarter century using field work and computational modeling to explore the dynamics of humanity’s relationship with the ecological communities of oceans and great lakes,” Kaufman said. “Our new project with BOEM is a fantastic opportunity to apply what we’ve learned to battling climate change and providing for our energy needs
“What we really bring to the table is an ability to synthesize geospatially what the system is, what’s living there, how they interact. We model it and probe the data to help us forecast possible outcomes of what we do,” he added. “We really feel like we’re on a huge adventure. Basic science and exploration are of immediate importance to human survival. Almost like a movie.”