The $15 million Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) will receive the funding over five years as part of the National Science Foundation’s Harnessing the Data Revolution, which establishes five institutes across the United States to explore questions at the frontiers of science and engineering. I-GUIDE will enable geospatial data-driven scientific discovery at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the resulting research will lead to better understanding of the risks and impacts of climate change and disasters.
CEOS Co-Director Amy Ando is a Senior Personnel researcher on the grant and will largely contribute to two tasks:
1. Assess sustainability of water management infrastructure.
The intersection of a changing climate with aging dams and other water management infrastructure poses a unique challenge to society [29, 30]. The aim of this task is to assess where investment can be best geospatially prioritized to establish sustainable water management, addressing aging of existing infrastructure and opportunities from green infrastructure.
2. Biodiversity and Food Security: Achieve transformative understanding of biodiversity dynamics under distant disasters, global changes, international trade, and land use.
The aim of this task is to improve our understanding of the connection between local land-use changes and global changes (e.g., population and income growth, climate change, floods, droughts, and pandemics) through international food trade and labor for food production.
See more in the official news release.
(Image by Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation.)