EPSCoR: Fire and Ice
Jennifer Schmidt, Ph.D.
The NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR) is a nationwide research and education effort administered by the National Science Foundation. Alaska’s main source of EPSCoR funding is its 5-year “Track-1” project, entitled “Fire and Ice: Navigating Variability in Boreal Wildfire Regimes and Subarctic Coastal Ecosystems.”
The goal of the Boreal Fires team is to increase community resilience to wildfire by improving evaluations of short-term fire risk, predictions of fire behavior, and understanding of fire mitigation strategies and of wildfire impacts on ecosystem services. The goal of the Coastal Margins team is to evaluate the impacts of large-scale ocean drivers and climate-driven landscape changes on glacial and non-glacial estuaries along the Gulf of Alaska, and to provide information that supports improved resource management and community resilience.