Urban Integrated Field Labs (IFL)

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The DOE SC Program in Biological and Environmental Research (BER), Earth and Environmental System Sciences Division (EESSD) hereby announces its interest in applications from the scientific community for Urban Integrated Field Laboratories (Urban IFLs) that will improve the science underpinning our understanding of climate and environmental predictability across complex and variable urban regions. EESSD supports fundamental systems level research aimed at identifying the foundational principles of dynamic physical, biogeochemical, and human processes and interactions and advancing fundamental understanding of the predictability of the climate and broader Earth system. EESSD develops the science, technology, and knowledge base that is necessary to inform actions to enable the resilience of natural-human systems that are exposed to climate trends, variabilities, and extremes. For the purposes of this FOA, urban regions are densely populated areas, encompassing interdependent environmental, ecological, infrastructure, and human components. Urban regions of interest for this FOA are in climate-sensitive locations, and are highly heterogeneous, i.e. having uneven distribution of physical landforms and vegetation, environmental processes, the built environment and infrastructure, population density, and socioeconomic clustering in the urban landscape, particularly when that heterogeneity relates to impacts on disadvantaged communities. The Urban IFLs will necessarily involve diverse scientific disciplines to develop comprehensive projects including field observations, data assimilation, modeling, and model-data fusion, to inform equitable solutions based on state-of-the-art uncertainty quantification and data analytics. Applications must be multi-institutional and focus on the development of a single IFL. While multiple IFLs may be selected in response to this FOA, considered together, each of the selected IFLs will represent different aspects of understanding urban systems, potentially including diverse demographic characteristics; differing climate-induced pressures on people and infrastructures; and unique geographic settings, e.g., coastal; arid lands; mountains; plains; or Great Lakes.

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