News
General Interest
The University of Arizona launches initiative at Biosphere 2
August 2, 2007
By Stephanie Doster
Biosphere 2
Credit: Pierre R. Schwob
The humid, leafy, and lush rain forest in Biosphere 2 grows just feet from the dry and prickly Sonoran Desert. Mechanized waves from a nearby mini-ocean flow over a coral reef and lap gently at a small beach. A short walk down a spiral staircase and through submarine-like doors reveals a biome that more closely matches the outdoors-the sun beats down on a flat, dry, dirt-filled area about the size of ten tennis courts. Nothing is growing there, yet.
Sheltered from the southern Arizona elements by thousands of windows, sealed glass, and a 500-ton welded stainless steel liner, this terrarium in Oracle is home to the future interdisciplinary research of University of Arizona scientists tackling questions about global climate change and how water works on Earth-research that is ramping up now that the UA has leased the 34.5-acre Biosphere 2 (B2) campus.
"We want to know where water goes, how it behaves, and how it is modified when things change, like patterns of vegetation or the patterns of climate that surround it," said Travis Huxman, director of B2 Earthscience, which will address issues of global environmental change. "Understanding the behavior of water is the key to tackling the interdisciplinary problems that challenge us, like global climate change."
Water is the most limiting resource on the planet, and 40 percent of the world's population lives in areas that are at risk of desertification, said Huxman, a UA associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Interdisciplinary research at Biosphere 2 is designed to ask questions that address society's concerns-water being one-to build the knowledge necessary to inform decision makers and plan for the future.
Scientists have two options when trying to understand our world, Huxman said, and neither is ideal. Researchers can experiment in highly controlled laboratories that are hardly adaptable to real-world situations, or they can head out into the field, where they have no control over all environmental conditions and processes, and therefore can't always understand how the world works on a mechanistic level.
"B2 is an unprecedented instrument that solves this particular problem," Huxman said. "It's on a spatial scale that encompasses the complexities we care about in the real world, but it has the environmental control of our controlled laboratory experiments. That makes it a useful tool that will bridge the different scales to build real knowledge about water and our environment." In one experiment within the complex, researchers will build three hill slopes, each about 30 yards long and 25 yards wide, to test how water moves down, into, and across the slopes.
The experiment will introduce plants and explore how having vegetation on a landscape changes the behavior of water, both in the air and the soil. The experiment is designed to help determine how plants modify their environment-how they change the amount of time a water molecule spends in the soil and how that affects the biogeochemical reactions that happen in soil only when it is wet. Huxman said he hopes experiments will begin at the end of the summer.
The generous size of the facility allows for highly interdisciplinary research, energizing, engaging, and integrating work from across the UA campus. B2 Earthscience scientists can ask related water questions yet approach the research from the perspective of their own disciplines.
"Biosphere 2 is really a focal point for some of what we do really well already," Huxman said. "It will let programs interact and then move across different temporal and spatial scales."
Peter Troch, professor of hydrology and water resources, and a number of ISPE faculty members are involved in Biosphere 2 research, including Huxman; David Breshears, professor of natural resources, Scott Saleska, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; Jonathan Chorover, professor of soil, water and environmental science; and Xubin Zeng, professor of atmospheric sciences. They all also serve on the B2 Earthscience science steering committee.
The researchers will study how variation in ground cover changes the amount of water that is partitioned to the atmosphere, soil, and vegetation, and how that partitioning changes with changing temperatures. They also will try to understand how carbon and water cycles interact with climate, how water interacts with the environment, and how plants affect water. In addition, they will build models that can be used in the distributed field studies that the UA manages throughout the southwestern U.S. This research will primarily be carried out in new, experimental grassland, desert, and savanna ecosystems that have yet to be built, but will also take advantage of some of the existing vegetation in the facility, including the tropical forest biome.
ISPE faculty members Lisa Graumlich, director of the School of Natural Resources, and James Washburne, adjunct assistant professor of hydrology and water resources, serve on the education and outreach steering committee.
In addition to fostering research, Biosphere 2 also will be used to train the next generation of scientists and students to understand how to tackle interdisciplinary questions, and to measure and consider the challenges that face society, Huxman said. At the same time, the complex will be open to the public, a portal to the ongoing research that, Huxman hopes, will help the community better understand how a field like ecology, among many others, "does science."
"I hope that people find a place here where science lives, where it changes, where it fails, and where it succeeds," Huxman said. "I hope this place is a place where we can tackle the grand challenges that threaten our way of life-these questions of water and climate change-and that it's a place where you can see the way that science is done."