Mississippi Basin Carbon Project Science Plan

Collaborative activities

An element essential to the success of the MBCP will be continued emphasis on cooperation and collaboration with active research programs within the USGS and other Federally and internationally funded global change research programs. The need for cooperation and collaboration is twofold:

1. The scientific problems confronting us require interdisciplinary expertise well beyond our own. No single agency or institution can claim sufficient expertise or resources to maintain a viable stand-alone program of the needed terrestrial carbon-cycle research.
2. As public servants, we must actively seek and inform public opinion concerning critical societal issues and our use of tax dollars to address these issues. One of our best avenues of public outreach is through the global change research community at large.

Perhaps the project’s most conspicuous opportunities for dialog and active collaboration are in our plans to make extensive use of existing models. We have initiated contacts with groups involved in the development of well-known models of landscape hydrology, soil carbon, and erosion. Although these groups are working on TOPMODEL, CENTURY, and WEPP, respectively, we will maintain active communications with groups working on other models. For example, to better appraise the relationship between our calculations and those used in the IPCC assessments of the global CO₂ budget, we have initiated a collaboration with terrestrial ecologists who are modeling the effects of land use on global carbon fluxes. Our modeling efforts will require substantial innovation, especially in linkages among different kinds of models, and we will benefit from the knowledge and advice of collaborators working with a diversity of models. We will also devote particular attention to model linkage efforts such as the USGS Modular Modeling System (Leavesley and others, 1996).

Collaborative opportunities exist in every aspect of our planned activities. For example, we have initiated formal cooperative arrangements with the ARS for field work at several sites of ongoing erosion research. Our characterization of the land surface will benefit from interaction with the activities of the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment Continental Scale International Project (GEWEX/GCIP) of the World Climate Research Program. To the extent possible, we will also structure our efforts so that they can take advantage of improved data products expected in the near future. These will include new 30-m Landsat TM-derived land cover data, high-resolution data expected in association with NOAA’s ETA Mesoscale Model, and data products anticipated from NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth.

Another beneficial form of collaboration is the opportunity for regular scientific review of our activities. We have initiated a proposal review process for consideration of limited USGS funding for external research directed at targeted problems beyond our own expertise. We will also establish mechanisms for routine independent review of both specific project activities and overall MBCP progress and plans.

	Contents
	Reconstructing effects of historical human land use
	Anticipated products