Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, Great Basin CESU

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The US Geological Survey, Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center (NOROCK), is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner to collect data from over 200 temperature sensors nested within 28 sites across ~100 million acres within the hydrographic Great Basin. The sites span all major aspects and occur up to 700 m of elevation within numerous management jurisdictions spanning 18 mountains ranges. This effort is aimed at helping quantify the variability of climate at micro-, meso-, and macroscales across the Basin, and across diel, seasonal and interannual periods; at informing management and conservation efforts in terms of calibrating and refining the climate ¿stage¿ upon which biological ¿actors¿ and efforts hinge; and at feeding into other bioclimatic and wildlife studies seeking to describe climate and biotic responses to it. After data collection, field data must be compared to remotely sensed observations of surface and ambient temperatures. If possible, project data should be integrated into efforts to model and spatially downscale remote sensing data. Finally, project efforts should analyze project data to improve models and answer ecological and environmental questions. These efforts may include evaluation and visualization of variability of temperatures across space and time, investigation of variability in temperature environmental lapse rates, gridded temperature dataset evaluation and downscaling, and remote sensing dataset corroboration.

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