Lawren Sack Department of Botany University of Hawaii at Manoa 3190 Maile Way Honolulu, HI 96822 808-956-9389 LSack@hawaii.edu
Climate and soil characteristics fundamentally shape the biotic composition, structure and function of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. In the Pacific Domain, climate changes have included warming, reduced precipitation and altered cloud water inputs (CWI). The resulting impacts on the composition, structure, and function of native ecosystems will likely vary with soil properties. Additionally, human activities resulting in land cover change and the ongoing invasion of native systems by non-native plants and animals will continue to impact ecosystems. The PACNEON domain (PACNEON) is ideally poised to understand these impacts and their complex interactions because the Hawaiian Islands contain gradients in climate and soil development of similar range to those in the continental US, yet are highly controlled and set across remarkably small distances.
In this RFI, we propose to incorporate NEON infrastructure into carefully selected, native dominated sites across independent gradients of moisture (MAP, 750 to 6000 mm), soil substrate age (300 to 4,100,000 yrs) and elevation (From 1600 to 2400m). Further, many common anthropogenic forcings are common in Hawaii including non-native species invasions and deforestation due to agriculture, urbanization, and logging. PACNEON will be able to pair areas altered by invasive species or land-use change with “pristine” sites arrayed across dramatic gradients for long-term observations. Within the NEON framework, long-term observations across these gradients will provide a unique source of information to understand the responses of widely ranging ecosystems to changing climate. This grand design will provide NEON with a near ideal natural laboratory with which to comprehensively study the independent and interactive impacts of climate, soils and human factors on the composition, structure and functioning of native ecosystems. Together with the strong interdisciplinary team of scientists who work on all aspects of ecology in Hawaii, PACNEON will be able to rigorously address many of NEON’s Grand Environmental Challenges, including how abiotic factors fundamentally control the functioning of native dominated ecosystems across multiple levels of organization (pollinator webs, food webs, atmospheric science, infectious diseases, biogeochemistry, and numerous other natural processes and their interactions); how human factors such as land-use, invasive species, and global environmental change impact ecosystem composition, structure and function; and how climate, soils and land-use change alter the ecohydrology of tropical watersheds. A critical outcome will be new knowledge to protect the threatened Hawaiian ecosystems, and numerous opportunities for broader impacts, including increased environmental awareness and understanding among K-12, undergraduate and graduate students, and citizen scientists in Hawaii, U.S.-affiliated Pacific islands and elsewhere.
This RFI has natural links to other NEON components. First, our proposed Core Wildland Site (RFI Part 3) represents the midpoint of our three gradients. Second, PACNEON’s precipitation and substrate age gradients extend to the Atlantic Neotropical (Puerto Rico) NEON platform, with whom we are coordinating RFIs. Puerto Rico is an island of similar size to the Island of Hawaii, but with contrasting flora, fauna and older volcanic soil substrates (10 to 90 million years). For both domains, unmanaged native-dominated sites along moisture gradients will be paired with altered sites (land-use, invasive species). Through the deployment of NEON cyberinfrastructure at Gradient and Core Wildland sites, the data gathered from the Pacific domain will be compiled into critical datastreams for the NEON-wide analyses and modeling objectives. Combining, the “continental microcosm” gradients of PACNEON, all these design elements and the links between RFIs and domains offers a broad context for examining abiotic and biotic controls on the composition, structure and functioning of native and altered ecosystems, and how these ecosystems will respond to changing climate.