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for access to high-precision geochronology labs creates a scientific bottleneck for
obtaining geochronological constraints and can be cost prohibitive.
Finding 4: Dedicated computational resources for paleoclimate modeling focused on
past warm periods and extreme and abrupt climate events are required for improved
parameterization, development of higher-resolution regional-scale models to capture
climate variability, and the integration of innovative paleoclimate intercomparison
models and data-model comparisons consistent with Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC)-style assessments. Similarly, additional computational
resources are needed for genomic analyses.
COUPLED HYDROGEOMORPHIC-ECOSYSTEM RESPONSE
TO NATURAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC CHANGE
The ways in which ecosystems and landscapes have co-evolved through time
and the nature of their coupled response to human activity and climate change present
tremendous opportunities for advancing our understanding of Earth surface processes.
Recognition of the degree to which hydrogeomorphological processes influence
ecological systems, and ecosystems in turn influence hydrogeomorphological
processes and dynamics, has opened up exciting new areas in the emerging fields of
ecohydrology, ecogeomorphology, and geobiology. It is now widely recognized that
climate change and disturbance, both natural and human, can have far-reaching
consequences for landscapes and ecosystems. Landscape-ecosystem response to
environmental change and disturbance can, in turn, affect climate and human
populations. The full scope and breadth of these interactions are only beginning to be
understood, in part because of the bi-directional nature of such feedbacks.
Landscapes and ecosystems in relatively rapidly changing, marginal environments
like coastal systems, wetlands, and permafrost regions are particularly vulnerable to
changes in climate and land use.
Our ability to anticipate the response of landscapes and ecosystems to
disturbance and climate change requires greater mechanistic understanding of the
interactions and feedbacks among hydrological drivers, landscape morphology, and
biotic processes. Advancing the science requires better theory, observations, and
models relating spatial patterns and temporal variability of landscape drivers
(topography, hydrology, geology) to the dynamics of biotic communities, including
identification of hydrological and morphological leading indicators of landscape and
ecosystem state change. Model development can continue to work toward bringing
the influence of biotic processes into formal representations of geomorphological and
hydrological processes and to couple these with models of climate and human-
landscape dynamics.
Finding 1: There is a particularly critical need to better understand the impact of
natural and anthropogenic environmental changes in coastal environments, where
these changes can be expected to have profound societal and economic consequences
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