AccelNet:GLASSNET: Networking Global to Local Analyses to Inform Sustainable Investments in Land and Water Resources

Global efforts to address poverty reduction, food and energy security, clean water, biodiversity, and climate change mitigation come with tradeoffs as well as synergies. Decisions on policies, infrastructure, and investments made in one place can have wide-spread consequences. Without the ability to link across global and local scales, proposed solutions to the earth system's grand challenges could be infeasible, misleading, or have unintended consequences. This AccelNet project, Global to Local Analysis of System Sustainability (GLASSNET), will address barriers of incomplete, complex, or proprietary data analysis by linking rapidly expanding sustainability science networks beyond the customary, individual researcher-to-researcher basis. GLASSNET will deliver transferable best practices for integration of models and data across spatial scales, disciplines, and cultures to address community-recognized grand challenges on a worldwide stage. GLASSNET links four U.S.-based global networks and five counterpart networks in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland that share common goals to build a multi-national bridge for intellectual partnership and community-shared resources. Through testbed activities in China, Brazil, and the Mediterranean region, GLASSNET will extend its global engagement and test its effectiveness for local and regional decision making. More than two dozen students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career researchers, including Native Americans, will be prepared to engage in and lead international sustainability team science through novel training, mentoring, guided networking, and exchanges across networks and nations.

The GLASSNET network of networks will employ a GeoHub geospatial cyberplatform to assemble and harmonize high-quality, spatially explicit, and multiscale land, water, and ecosystem data that currently reside in fragmented form within different disciplines, research communities, and countries. While local circumstances require fine-scale analyses, market forces and government policies drive global changes that compel macro-level analyses. Network integration will begin with piloting common data frameworks. Modeling tools will be deployed for deeper analysis to understand and quantify tradeoffs inherent in the equitable and sustainable use of land and water resources. GLASSNET will tackle the particularly challenging problem of downscaling outputs of economic models and aggregating fine-scale economic and ecosystem results. By linking multiple existing networks and engaging testbeds in key regions of the world, GLASSNET will improve parameterization of existing models and incorporate new analytical tools to innovatively represent institutional and biophysical constraints. Evaluation of participant productivity across natural and social science disciplines involved in this network of networks will generate novel insights into the role of multi-teaming across the diverse participants in facilitating research productivity and early career professional development.

The Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet) program is designed to accelerate the process of scientific discovery and prepare the next generation of U.S. researchers for multiteam international collaborations. The AccelNet program supports strategic linkages among U.S. research networks and complementary networks abroad that will leverage research and educational resources to tackle grand scientific challenges that require significant coordinated international efforts.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.