A document by Shelley Stall. Click on the document to view its contents.

The National Science Foundation provided support to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to engage its relevant community and help clarify the need for a Near-Surface Geophysics (NSG) Center and identify how it could advance key science questions, provide benefits for society, and develop the geophysical workforce of the future. This report synthesizes the broad input from the community. The listed authors represent the Steering Committee, led by Sarah Kruse and Xavier Comas, and AGU staff leads. They were responsible for most of the editing and connective writing. The major conclusions are: ● The capability and importance of NSG is expanding rapidly, and NSG is providing key science and knowledge to many specific scientific challenges in diverse disciplines–from ecology and anthropology to hydrology, oceanography, cryosphere science, soil and critical zone science, and more. ● This has been thanks to diverse new instruments and approaches, expanded monitoring, improved resolution, interoperable data sets, and new computing power and approaches, among other developments. ● As a result, advancing NSG is critical to addressing many societal challenges at local to global scales. Human society depends on and interacts with the NSG environment in deep and diverse ways at all scales. ● Despite these developments, integration of NSG approaches and awareness of these across related disciplines are not nearly robust enough for these needs. ● Major challenges include providing equipment and training around its use, developing and deploying new equipment and sensors, developing interoperable data, and developing computation techniques. ● In particular, educating both current researchers and developing an NSG-enabled workforce is a major challenge. ● Integrating education with societal and scientific challenges provides a great opportunity and means to expand inclusivity and diversity in the Earth sciences and to address climate justice and equity challenges. ● Thus there was a strong consensus for support of an NSG Center designed to address these challenges and needs and to foster convergent science, provide broad and hands-on educational training, and engage communities and the public meaningfully. ● We were not charged with envisioning the specific model for a Center—and indeed emphasized that the term “Center” was generic and did not necessarily imply that these efforts were envisioned to be in one location–but note that NSF is supporting important complementary facilities include the new EarthScope Consortium combining IRIS and UNAVCO, NCALM, and CTEMPS. ● In sum, we strongly encourage the NSF to take the next step in considering the best implementation model for a NSG Center that addresses these needs, enables these opportunities, and leverages and complements existing efforts.

Several bills moving through Congress are likely to provide significant funding for expanding research and results in climate change solutions (CCS). This is also a priority of the Biden-Harris Administration. The National Science Foundation (NSF) will be expected to distribute and manage much of this funding through its grant processes. Effective solutions require both a continuation and expansion of research on climate change–to understand and thus plan for potential impacts locally to globally and to continually assess solutions against a changing climate–and rapid adoption and implementation of this science with society at all levels. NSF asked AGU to convene its community to help provide guidance and recommendations for enabling significant and impactful CCS outcomes by 1 June. AGU was asked in particular to address the following: 1. Identify the biggest, more important interdisciplinary/convergent challenges in climate change that can be addressed in the next 2 to 3 years 2. Create 2-year and 3-year roadmaps to address the identified challenges. Indicate partnerships required to deliver on the promise. 3. Provide ideas on the creation of an aggressive outreach/communications plan to inform the public and decision makers on the critical importance of geoscience. 4. Identify information, training, and other resources needed to embed a culture of innovation, entrepreneurialism, and translational research in the geosciences. Given the short time frame for this report, AGU reached out to key leaders, including Council members, members of several committees, journal editors, early career scientists, and also included additional stakeholders from sectors relevant to CCS, including community leaders, planners and architects, business leaders, NGO representatives, and others. Participants were provided a form to submit ideas, and also invited to two workshops. The first was aimed at ideation around broad efforts and activities needed for impactful CCS; the second was aimed at in depth development of several broad efforts at scale. Overall, about 125 people participated; 78 responded to the survey, 82 attended the first workshop, and 28 attended the more-focused second workshop (see contributor list). This report provides a high-level summary of these inputs and recommendations, focusing on guiding principles and several ideas that received broader support at the workshops and post-workshop review. These guiding principles and ideas cover a range of activities and were viewed as having high importance for realizing impactful CCS at the scale of funding anticipated. These cover the major areas of the charge, including research and solutions, education, communication, and training. The participants and full list of ideas and suggestions are provided as an appendix. Many contributed directly to this report; the listed authors are the steering committee.

GeoHealth represents the critical intersection between the Earth and environmental sciences, and agricultural and health sciences. Following a specific request from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this report provides a series of recommendations aimed at empowering research, building fundamental workforce capacity, and improving communication around GeoHealth to the public and policy makers. This development is critical as a robust GeoHealth research enterprise is essential to global health, human and ecosystem well-being, and sustainability. The AGU community along with those from several allied societies provided the recommendations in this report; these were developed for a detailed survey and two workshops. The survey and other input revealed several broad challenges and needs, including highly siloed funding and support for researchers across institutions and societies, the inability to access or combine key datasets, and in particular the lack of clear career trajectories and support. The recommendations consist of: (i) six programmatic areas where significant attention to building a GeoHealth research enterprise is needed; (ii) approaches and concepts for four specific challenges in GeoHealth for which significant results could be enabled rapidly, within 2-3 years; (iii) ideas for developing an education/career path and for outreach; (iv) larger “moonshot” ideas that might yield very significant impacts over ca. 10 years. All of these have several common elements and themes: they leverage many directorates within NSF, including all within the GEO division; can build off of existing initiatives; are best developed through partnerships with other agencies and communities; and rely on open and FAIR data sets. Although the focus of these recommendations is toward and for the NSF, the suggestions are more general and hopefully will be considered by other funding agencies and other parts of the research enterprise in the U.S. and internationally.