PS 26-91 - Connecting federal land managers, students, and the best available science: Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units

Abstract: From reintroducing extirpated species, restoring ecosystems, mitigating climate change, to managing museum collections and creating cultural histories, the National Park Service (NPS) relies on the latest scientific research to meet its mission. While the NPS employs a world-class scientific and technical workforce, science and technical services are not always available or most efficiently obtained in-house. Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units (CESU) are multi-agency, university-based collaborations providing scientific research, technical assistance, and education to partner federal agencies. The CESU Network includes more than 490 nonfederal partners and 17 federal agencies across seventeen CESUs representing biogeographic regions encompassing all 50 states. This network is well positioned as a platform to support research, technical assistance, education, and capacity building that is responsive to long-standing and contemporary science and resource management priorities. The partners serve the biological, physical, social, cultural, and engineering disciplines needed to address natural and cultural resource management issues at multiple scales and in an ecosystem context. Our goals are to provide: 1) students easy access to career opportunities across multiple federal land management agencies 2) researchers, community colleges, tribes, and non-profit organizations information on how to join if not already a member and access to funding opportunities, and 3) federal employees direct links to CESU researchers.

We provide an array of CESU web-based information portals at multiple universities and federal websites. We use case studies to highlight projects that have connected students, researchers, and federal land managers across multiple scales. Specifically, the Californian CESU is piloting a data science partnership that pairs teams of students who have advanced programming and statistical modeling skills with NPS scientists. Example pilot projects include automating large wildlife counts using satellite imagery, exploring complex fish population trends with minimal data, and characterizing alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevada. Federal agencies advertise competitive research projects through the CESU network providing opportunities for new partners/researchers to engage with land managers. Currently, multiple researchers from the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin CESUs are assisting with landscape-scale fire and weed management in the sagebrush-bunchgrass steppe community. It is critical that federal managers have access to the best available science as we are now faced with unprecedented challenges requiring novel management approaches. For example, the Hawaii-Pacific Islands CESU is helping to support a novel mosquito control project on Maui to save rapidly declining high elevation endemic birds now threatened by warming climatic conditions and avian malaria.