Current Research Grants

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544

C U R R E N T R E S E A R C H G R A N T S


BP Amoco/Ford Motor Company Carbon Mitigation Initiative
A Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton University Stephen W. Pacala and Robert H. Socolow, Principial Investigators The relentless increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide and scientific evidence points toward a future constrained by "the carbon problem." To solve the carbon problem, new technologies for the capture and storage of the carbon in fossil fuels must be implemented on a fantastic scale. The majority of the roughly one thousand billion tons of carbon in the fossil fuels consumed over the 21st century will need to be actively redirected from the atmosphere and sequestered elsewhere. In October 2000, BP and Ford Motor Company jointly announced the formation of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) at Princeton University to develop new approaches to carbon management. Recognizing the complexity and durability of the issues, both BP and Ford Motor Company have made a ten-year commitment, with BP funding of $15,100,000 and Ford Motor Company funding of $5,000,000. The vision of the CMI is to lead the way to compelling and sustainable solutions to the carbon and climate change problem. By combining the unique and complementary strengths of the CMI partners, we seek a novel synergy across fundamental science, technology development, and business principles that accelerates the pace from discovery, through proof of concept, to scalable application. CMI will focus on resolving the fundamental scientific, environmental, and technological issues that ultimately will determine public acceptance of carbon management strategies. It will search for strategies that: 1) will have the desired effect on atmospheric carbon and climate; 2) will be safe and reliable with limited environmental impact; and 3) will involve neither prohibitive economic costs nor prohibitive disruption of patterns of energy consumption. The first CMI projects are in four areas: carbon capture, carbon storage, carbon science, and carbon policy. Carbon capture projects explore the hydrogen-plus-electricity economy: Low-cost routes to hydrogen production from natural gas and coal, with a first focus on advanced membrane reactors. Infrastructure requirements for hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Hydrogen combustion. Carbon storage projects explore the safety, reliability and environmental impact of carbon storage in underground reservoirs: Predictive models of CO2 leakage, with an emphasis on chemistry in drinking-water aquifers and the unsaturated zone. Experimental studies of the basic chemistry of CO2 at high pressure. Exploratory studies of alternatives to underground storage (e.g., oceanic injection, carbonate production, enhanced biological sequestration). Carbon science projects explore the consequences of large-scale carbon management: Earth system modeling of the impact of alternative mitigation options on greenhouse gases and climate. Analysis of abrupt changes in the carbon and climate system. Shipboard measurements of the O2/N2 ratio of air to estimate natural CO2 sequestration by the land biosphere and oceans. Carbon policy projects explore the economics and international dimensions of carbon management: The economics of leaky containment and the discounting of future damages. Alternatives to cap-and-trade systems. Visit the CMI web page: http://www.princeton.edu/~cmi


National Aeronautics & Space Administration - NASA
Modeling the Biogeochemical System of the Terrestrial Amazon: Issues of Sustainability [Subcontract with the University of New Hampshire] Stephen W. Pacala, Principal Investigator Berrian Moore III, Co-Principal Investigator (University of New Hampshire) The objective of this research is to understand the interactive effects of changes in landuse and climate on 1) carbon storage and nutrient dynamics, including trace gas fluxes, in terrestrial ecosystems and 2) the prospect for sustainable landuse in Amazonia. The specific product of the research will be a set of coupled, hierarchically structured models accessible through a common model framework. This framework will provide the means for investigating our principal objectives. We shall consider the LBA region within the context of two broad environmental conditions: 1) natural ecosystems where perturbations in biogeochemical states are driven primarily by natural variability of climate and fire, and 2) disturbance gradients that are induced by human landuse activities and/or human-induced climate change. We will use our models of terrestrial biogeochemical cycles, vegetation dynamics, hydrology and landuse change. We will concentrate on model improvements to ensure applicability of all models to the LBA study region. The ecosystem and hydrology models will be driven by the physical climate, whereas the landuse model will be driven by biophysical, ecological and economic constraints. The linked models (Fig. 1) will be incorporated into a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) context, accessing numerous data sets from LBA or data layers housed at our institutions. We will evaluate model performance by comparison with field measurements from LBA as well from published data sources. We will use satellite remote sensing analysis as a means to evaluate the spatial and temporal patterns of model performance at the regional scale. Finally, we will apply formal statistical methods to characterize model uncertainty, as we apply this work to the question of the human impacts on the Amazonian landscape. Change from both natural and anthropogenic sources must be appropriately understood. Therefore, we will focus on three objectives: 1) the natural pattern of variability in net primary production, respiration, nutrient availability, and the flux of trace gases between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere; 2) human-altered landcover and ecosystem distribution and condition; and 3) the associated changes in the pattern of net primary production, respiration, nutrient availability, and flux of trace gases between terrestrial ecosystem and the atmosphere. We recognize that this research proposal is ambitious. The effect will draw significant support from our EOS IDS grant and other currently funded activities. Table F.1 (in Section F) summarizes this support. Our effort will be supported by other agencies and institutions, including the MIT Joint Program on Policy and Global Change, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory DAAC, and the University of Texas (Dr. J. Famiglietti). Section J includes letters of support from these outside collaborators.


National Science Foundation Center for Biocomplexity
Biocomplexity: The emergence of ecosystem pattern Simon Levin, Principal Investigator Stephen Pacala, Co-Principal Investigator Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Co-Principal Investigator François Morel, Co-Principal Investigator Lars Hedin, Co-Principal Investigator Ecosystems are the integrated networks of biotic and abiotic elements through which materials and information flow, and that support our continued existence on the planet. From ecosystems we derive food and fiber, fuel and pharmaceuticals. Ecosystems mediate local and regional climates, stabilize soils, purify water and in general provide a nearly endless list of services essential to life as we know it. The case for the preservation of ecosystems and these services is manifestly clear, but the essential challenge of how to do it depends on our knowledge of how macroscopic properties develop from, and feed back upon, diverse assemblages of biotic and abiotic elements. At the levels of ecosystems, as well as the biosphere as a whole, homeostatic processes regulate climate, and maintain the physical and chemical environment that sustains our life-support systems. This proposal seeks to understand what mechanisms, at the level of the interactions between organisms and their environments, sustain those processes, The existence of macroscopic properties at scales of ocean basins and forested regions is relevant both for basic questions on how biocomplexity emerges above the level of organisms and species, and for applied questions about sustainability and management of ecological systems. The approach will combine empirical and theoretical work to attempt to answer these questions, and to provide the scientific basis to aid in our management of the biosphere. pdf "Biocomplexity: The emergence of ecosystem pattern"


Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Emergence and Evolution of Ecosystem Functioning Simon A. Levin, Principal Investigator Lars O. Hedin, Co-Principal Investigator Stephen W. Pacala, Co-Principal Investigator Associated faculty: Henry S. Horn, François Morel, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Daniel Sigman, and Bess Ward For decades, the disciplines of population biology and ecosystems science have developed with inadequate contact between them, seemingly addressing distinct problems on different scales. That situation has changed dramatically in the past decade, even as ecosystems science has become more global in scope, and as much of population biology has relied increasingly on molecular techniques. Indeed, the need to deal with phenomena across these distinct levels of organization and complexity has made more obvious, and more urgent, the importance of finding ways to scale, from the small scale to the large, and from the individual to the biosphere. The time is ripe for innovative, integrative approaches to such integration from theoretical as well as empirical perspectives. Princeton certainly is not alone in its attention to these problems, but has unique capabilities to develop novel approaches in understanding and conceptualizing the dynamics of diverse systems. Our group has over the past year and a half developed strong partnerships reaching from autecology and population biology to hydrology and biogeochemical cycling, and involving both theoretical and empirical approaches. We propose to use this foundation to further develop a collaborative training and research program at the interface between population biology and biogeochemical cycling, with central focus on training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In this way, we expect to develop a cadre of young scientists well-grounded in both disciplines, and with the interdisciplinary perspectives that are necessary for future intellectual leadership in ecology and biogeochemistry. The general themes of this project will involve an understanding of community and ecosystem structure and functioning, across systems and across scales. We shall particularly be interested in grasslands, temperate and tropical forests, and marine coastal and off-shore systems. In all of this research, the work will be soundly based in empirical work, but also closely linked to the development of theoretical and quantitative models. . In particular, we will build on techniques we have long been developing for modeling spatially distributed populations, and for scaling from microscopic to macroscopic phenomena. Many of these techniques, and many of the empirical patterns that we will address, have been developed under prior Mellon funding. pdf "The Emergence and Evolution of Ecosystem Functioning"