EMergent Ecosystem Response to ChanGE Biology Integration Institute and IsoGenie: Stordalen Mire

Predictive understanding of ecosystem response to change has become a pressing societal need in the Anthropocene, and requires integration across disciplines, spatial scales, and timeframes. Developing a framework for understanding how different biological systems interact over time is a major challenge in biology. Rapid warming in the Arctic is driving permafrost thaw, and new availability of formerly-frozen soil carbon for cycling and release to the atmosphere, representing a potentially large but poorly constrained accelerant of climate change. The National Science Foundation-funded EMergent Ecosystem Responses to ChanGE (EMERGE) Biology Integration Institute (NSF Award #2022070) aims to develop such a framework by integrating research, training, and high-resolution field and laboratory measurements across 15 scientific subdisciplines–including ecology, physiology, genetics, biogeochemistry, remote sensing, and modeling–across 14 institutions. EMERGE focuses on ecosystem-climate feedbacks in Stordalen Mire, a model thawing permafrost peatland in arctic Sweden. EMERGE is a natural continuation of the IsoGenie collaboration, funded by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER), grants DE-SC0004632, DE-SC0010580 and DE-SC0016440, as both studied Stordalen Mire. This umbrella BioProject is a collection of data from all of these efforts. Further information about EMERGE can be found at the website (https://emerge-bii.github.io/).