20080868 Ver 2_Emails_20080718 (5)

NC DENR DWQ Collaboration on NASA Roses Proposal
Subject: NC DENR DWQ Collaboration on NASA Roses Proposal
From: "Truesdale, Robert S." <[e-mail]>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:29:24 -0400
To: "John Dorney" <[e-mail]>
CC: <[e-mail]>, "Boos, John" <[e-mail]>, "Jim Cooper"
<[e-mail]>, "Barber, Mary" <[e-mail]>
Dear John,
I enjoyed speaking with you at the Coastal Carolinas symposium about NC DENR's possible support and collaboration for
the proposal being prepared by the U.S. EPA, MDA Federal, and RTI International. In the proposal, we are seeking a grant
from the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) Program. Per our conversation, I wanted to
provide you with a brief description of what we are envisioning. Please feel free to share this with Rick, Ginny, and others
at NC DENR.
The NASA ROSES Program has identified "Public Health Impacts of Climate Change" and "Ecological Forecasting" as
priority topics for the 2008 grants. To these ends, we propose the development of a computer-based tool that can be used
by conservation and land management organizations and, ultimately, public health and planning officials to determine the
potential for climate change-driven health impacts on populations at different geographic scales. The tool would allow
users to calculate the public health effects of various environmental changes on human populations based upon the
distribution of the population relative to different ecosystems and their associated ecosystem services and disservices. By
comparing alternative land management and development schemes, conservation organizations, regulators, and public
health officials and planners could work together to develop options that balance public health impacts, economic
development, and environmental conservation.
The proposal is being driven jointly by researchers from the US EPA, MDA Federal, and RTI International. The principal
investigator for the project is Greg Koeln from MDA Federal, Inc. Co-investigators include Laura Jackson of EPA/ORD,
John Boos and myself at RTI, and researchers from the NASA Ames Research Center (for climate change modeling). In
addition to NC DENR, other identified collaborators and end-users include The Nature Conservancy, the National
Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), and the American Public Health Association. Other
seemingly logical end users include planning associations, state and local health and planning organizations, the military,
and other owners, managers, or regulators of coastal wetland properties.
The project will be completed in two phases. The first phase will focus on ecological forecasting and will attempt to
determine changes in ecosystem and land cover distribution over the next 30 to 50 years as using the global drivers of sea
level rise and climate change. Remote sensing and meteorological data from a variety of sources will be incorporated with
downscaled climate change models (including local models of sea-level rise), to identify possible localized climate futures
and the associated impacts on ecosystems the resulting changes in their distribution. Concurrently, changes in settlement
patterns and population distribution and demographics will also be modeled and mapped to estimate potential human
exposure to various ecosystem services and disservices. From these exposures estimates of potential future health impacts
can be determined in the second phase. Geographically, this project will initially focus on wetlands in the coastal Carolinas;
however the generalized methodologies developed should be applicable to other regions and ecosystems.
Central to the ROSES Program is the concept that grantees develop ideas with a vision for practical application. To these
ends, NASA requires that all proposals have the support of at least one and no more than four end-user organizations that
believe that the output of the grant will aid in their operational, decision-making, and/or planning processes. It is for this
reason that we seek your endorsement of and involvement in this proposal; the amount of involvement is completely up to
you. I am enjoying our collaboration on the SEIWA project and can see some logical connections between that project and
this proposal. We would welcome your involvement and wetlands expertise throughout proposal development and grant
implementation to ensure a more useable end product to you and NC DENR. Similarly, we also understand if you have
other priorities and prefer a lower level of involvement.
We are eager to collaborate with NC DENR on this project and help you regulate and protect coastal wetlands in response
to climate change. If you are interested, we will require a letter stating your support for the grant when the proposal is
submitted in mid-August. In the meantime we would welcome your input to help focus our proposal on the climate change
impacts and challenges that your organization is most concerned about, for example:
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