Large-scale CoPe Hub: Rising Voices, Changing Coasts: The National Indigenous and Earth Sciences Convergence Hub

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). The Rising Voices, Changing Coasts (RVCC) Hub will create a space for convergence of disciplines and epistemologies where Indigenous knowledge-holders from diverse coastal regions will work with university-trained social, ecosystem, and physical Earth system scientists and students on transformative convergence research to address coastal hazards in the contexts of their communities.

The goals are to 1) co-produce convergence research with social and Earth sciences and Indigenous Knowledges to improve modeling and prediction of coastal processes that support decision making by Indigenous communities around mitigation and adaptation, 2) develop a successful, inclusive framework for cross-cultural convergence research that can be adopted and adapted by future research collaborations, 3) broaden participation amongst Indigenous students and researchers, and train a new generation of diverse convergence research scientists, 4) increase administrative and technological infrastructure to support current and future research with and by Indigenous scientists and communities. The place-based research is focused on four regions: Alaska (Arctic), Louisiana (Gulf of Mexico), Hawai‘i (Pacific Islands), and Puerto Rico (Caribbean Islands).

The RVCC Hub will combine Indigenous Knowledges, modeling capabilities, archeological records, GIS techniques, socio-economic analysis, and hazards research. Together, these data, transdisciplinary analysis, and convergent findings will enhance fundamental understanding of the interconnected physical, cultural, social, and economic processes that result in coastal hazards and climate resilience opportunities and increase the accuracy, relevance, and usability of model predictions on multi-decadal timescales.

Selecting four diverse marine coastal regions - ranging from tropical to Arctic - will allow this hub to compare similarities and differences across the regions in order to build understanding of largescale drivers of change, how these drivers manifest and are observed locally, and how Indigenous communities vary in their adaptive responses. By focusing on marine coastal areas in Indigenous territories, this project will be able to use the fullest capabilities of Earth system modeling, test the extent of downscaling capabilities, and couple those data with ancestral observations and contemporary adaptive capacity of communities.

Bringing together Indigenous Knowledges with Earth system modeling will also test the efficacy of converging multi-epistemological ways of knowing. Therefore, this Hub will advance the physical understanding and modeling capabilities of climate scientists; enhance documentation and invest in Indigenous methodologies of climate and ecological knowledge, and test how these distinct frameworks of data and knowledge can co-inform and advance one another.

The trans-disciplinary, cross-cultural team will advance understanding of how data and knowledge can inform community decision-makers and how community-held knowledge can make science more applicable in building resilience. Improved modeling capabilities will be incorporated into the Community Earth System Model and will be publicly released and freely available.

The RVCC Hub’s analysis will enable Indigenous participants to identify the likelihood and nature of future coastal changes, and to develop mitigation and adaptation strategies that target their priorities. The student and postdoctoral opportunities that integrated into this project will broaden participation amongst Indigenous students and researchers, and train a new generation of diverse convergence research scientists.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.