Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Abandonment and rebound: Societal views on landscape- and land-use change and their impacts on water and soils (ABRESO)

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 9-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations representing over 55 countries focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The research teams will work to identify sustainable pathways to help alleviate the increasing and unprecedented pressure on the natural resources that interact to provide sustainable life support systems and essential benefits to societies such as food production and water quality and quantity. The impacts of changes in land management and urbanization will be evaluated to develop sustainable soils and groundwater management options that will help create and maintain sustainable terrestrial ecosystems.

The project seeks to develop a global transdisciplinary platform for understanding the impacts of land abandonment on sustainability of soil and water resources. Land abandonment and subsequent land use or land cover change can have profound implications for water resources, as the changing fabric of the Critical Zone dictates changes in infiltration, runoff, and the delivery of sediment and nitrogen to groundwater and surface waters. The project team will describe social and natural forcing functions that drive land abandonment and subsequent land use change; and quantify impacts on water quality due to this abandonment. The team will also identify gaps in understanding of the impacts and those perceived by stakeholders so that land use change can be better understood and modeled. The team will use this information to develop a modeling framework to assess sustainability of various land use and land abandonment scenarios in the context of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

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.