New Research Opportunities in the Earth Sciences - New Research Opportunities in the Earth Sciences - page 68

into practice (see Figure 2.21). Similarly, the USGS Grand Canyon Monitoring and
Research Center and the Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program have been
spearheading high-resolution data collection and state-of-the-art model development
to determine if planned water releases from Glen Canyon Dam designed to mimic
natural seasonal flooding can be used to improve downstream resources in Grand
Canyon National Park.
A key challenge in designing sustainable land uses, from forestry to urban
drainage systems, is how to develop regional understanding of landscape history,
processes, and change due to both human activity and climate change (past and
future). The geography, geomorphology, and ecology of specific landscapes hold the
key to understanding human influences on landscapes and therefore are central to
correctly diagnosing ecosystem condition and designing effective mitigation,
restoration, or adaptation techniques. In this sense the history and effects of land use
in different regions could be considered as individual experiments to be probed in the
search for deeper, more general, understanding. Similarly, carefully monitored
restoration efforts offer case studies that can be used to test and improve quantitative
models of landscape evolution. These models, in turn, suggest gaps in our
understanding of the underlying processes and critical observations needed to move
forward. When observations and modeling go hand in hand, rapid progress can be
made in our ability to understand past change and predict future landscape response
to restoration activities and other change. Such studies are important because the
restoration of rivers, wetlands, and deltas is already a major enterprise, and there is a
compelling need for Earth scientists to contribute to developing and evaluating
methods, strategies, and insights into how to efficiently proceed in many
environments.