Collaborative Research: GCR: Convergent Anthropocene Systems (Anthems) - A System-of-Systems Paradigm

Convergent Anthropocene Systems (Anthems) will develop a systems-of-systems (SoS) convergence paradigm that includes an SoS computational framework, an SoS decision-support system, and an SoS pedagogy, enabling diverse stakeholders to integratively address the suite of societal challenges of the Anthropocene (e.g., climate change and impacts, renewable energy, adaptive infrastructure, disasters, pandemics, food insecurity, biodiversity loss) and catalyzing a major transformation in national and global approaches to the science and engineering relevant to these challenges. This paradigm will be developed, implemented, and validated in close collaboration with the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP), focusing on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (CBW) region. The CBW is home to over 17 million people and the CBP stakeholder community will benefit from integrated modeling tools to examine synergies (e.g., nutrient reduction and flood risk mitigation) and tradeoffs (e.g., nutrient reduction and fish productivity) across multiple systems. Together, the CBW and the CBP provide a real-world testbed for the SoS convergence paradigm, enabling the project to bring together intellectually-diverse researchers to address multiple interdependent societal challenges (eutrophication, food and agriculture, and economic growth) by integrating across multiple systems (watershed, land use, economic, estuary and governance) and multiple disciplines (environmental engineering, city and regional planning, planning policy and design, civil engineering, geography, industrial and systems engineering, political economy and public policy). Anthems will develop, implement, and validate the SoS convergence paradigm for a set of interdependent societal challenges in the CBW region. In Phase 1, Anthems will integrate regional models of land use, watershed, and economics using the SoS computational framework, engage with stakeholders to evaluate regional scenarios, and begin the development and evaluation of the SoS decision-support system and SoS pedagogy. Phase 2 will extend the SoS computational framework by including estuary and governance models, while zooming in to Baltimore at the urban scale. One outcome of this project will be the capability to scale up the SoS paradigm to a larger family of societal challenges in the future, generalizing the approach to other regions and their associated urban areas. The SoS computational framework advances the existing systems engineering literature, addressing Anthropocene challenges. The SoS decision-support system provides a structured approach for translating SoS scenarios and computational results into real-world insights for a diverse set of stakeholders. The SoS pedagogy will begin to train a new generation of Anthropocene System Integrators (including students, academics, practitioners and stakeholders) to conceptualize Anthropocene challenges holistically, think coherently in terms of common ontological constructs, produce and simulate SoS computational models, facilitate decision-support conversations filled with coherent, data-driven, real-world insights, and use these insights to once again conceptualize societal problems. The effectiveness of the SoS pedagogy will be studied using the science-of-team-science-based antecedent-process-output evaluation model, thereby advancing the study of convergence processes and outcomes. 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.