 Well, welcome everyone and thank you for attending this webinar today. Just before we start, I wanted to remind everyone that for everyone to be able to hear it's nice if people remain on mute. And if you have questions, which we really hope that you will do, please post them in a chat room. I'm not sure how everyone's screen is showing up for them, but for me, I have at the top of my screen, I have a panel, a Zoom panel, and there's a more button where I can get to chat. Sometimes that Zoom panel is on the lower part of your screen, so you might see that there as well. If any questions come up at any time, please post them in the chat and we will get to all the questions at the end. So thank you very much. All right, so let me introduce myself. I'm Nicole Gasparini. I am an associate professor at Tulane University and I am representing a team of five of us. Lili, who's at Penn State, Kamini Singa, who is at Colorado School of Mines, Pam Sullivan, who is at Oregon State, and Nikki West, who I should have wrote this down. I think she is at Central Michigan. Sorry, Nikki, if I got that wrong. I know she is in Michigan. I apologize for that. So all of us are a team of people who are approaching CZ science in kind of diverse ways and from different backgrounds. So we're engineers and we're scientists. We're hydrologists and geomorphologists and geochemists and we're modelers and we're field data people and we're lab people, remote sensing scientists and we're coming at critical zone from many different backgrounds and also experiences. Personally I have never been formally part of a critical zone observatory. So I might be slightly an outsider and I hope that I don't say anything that appears a little bit off to some of you who might be more versed in critical zone science. I'm going to remind you of this many times but one of the things that we're doing is having a series of five workshops and our first one is going to be next June 2020. So please keep a lookout for that and we will open up applications for that. And we will also starting in January 2020 do a series of webinars and those will be hosted by quasi. So if you found us through a tweet, if you found us through a listserv, we will post on all of those same listservs and tweets and even more for our webinars and our upcoming workshop. Okay. And of course thank you to CSDMS for hosting this today and then also NSF for funding us. Okay. All right. So sorry about that. Okay. So what are we going to do today? I'm going to pretty quickly go through what our plan is, the five of us, for our new critical zone research coordination network. And if you don't know what a research coordination network is, I didn't before I joined this team. It's a research coordination network or RCN. These are NSF funded vehicles in there for not for doing research per se but bringing people together to create networks that can attack different research questions. Okay. And so we are going to do that in a number of ways. We're going to set up networks through communities and our search, excuse me, through workshops and through webinars to bring new people, both literally new people who haven't done CSD science before and new ideas across disciplines from early career to whatever career stage to think about some of the CSD questions that we actually think are needed to be asked and answered to move critical zone science forward. Okay. All right. So many of you will be familiar with this but what is critical zone science? I have heard it described as the mother of all interdisciplinary earth science. It integrates from the atmosphere all the way down to the solid rock. And it involves many, many different disciplines and these are disciplines acting that focus at different spatial scales and focus at different temporal scales. And all of these disciplines come together to create what we call the critical zone. So some of you may focus primarily on the canopy or vegetation above the surface. Some people may focus more on the subsurface. Some people may focus on water moving through there. That's all part of the critical zone and we're really interested in that architecture and the boundaries and gradients across it. Okay. And we think that in order to move forward with CSD science because a lot has been done in the past few decades, we need to really open up and have a more inclusive community of scientists who are working on CSD science. Okay. So this comes to this idea of convergent thinking and bringing multiple ideas to attack one particular question and to solve, to bring solutions from multiple disciplines. Okay. So I personally identify as a geomorphologist and a hydrologist. Sometimes I identify as a hydrologist, although not around hydrologists necessarily. But CSD science is really very, very cross disciplinary and transdisciplinary and all the across words that you might want to come up with. And we need to really work together and bring all of our tools, all of our thinking to understand the critical zone better. All right. So these are overarching themes of critical zone science and these work, these came were developed at a all hands CZO meeting. So I was not in attendance at that meeting, but these were summarized by some of my colleagues on my RCN team. All right. So the first is how is the terrestrial energy balance measurable as patterns in CZ structure and function. Okay. And this is something that we have talked a lot about in our RCN is how do we define CZ structure and how do we define CZ architecture? Where does the CZ end? What's the lower limit? And how do we have fluxes across the CZ? Okay. So it fits in nicely with what we are interested in our RCN. All right. How is the structure and function of the CZ related to the global carbon cycle and not just the global carbon cycle, but also local carbon dynamics. All right. So again, we really need to define that structure and architecture of the critical zone. All right. What ecosystem services does the critical zone provide and how will they change during the Anthropocene? And I think many of us as citizens and as scientists are concerned about changes that are happening today and moving forward. And the critical zone, of course, is going to be very sensitive to all of the changes that are happening. And this is something we also want to explore in our RCN. Okay. And how are we going to measure these patterns and processes? How will we know what's changing and how will we know what rates things are changing and how is the land surface, how is the critical zone going to evolve, and how is that going to affect future functioning, okay? So our RCN is working at expanding boundaries and exploring gradients in the CZ through data model synergy. And we want to tackle these questions by integrating broader participation and ideas into the CZ community. All right. So we have a few main questions that we would like to explore in a series of small meetings and webinars and a web page and interaction with the community, all right? The first one is what tools and approaches are needed to advance our understanding of CZ thickness and depth. And I kind of love this particular first question because all of these slides I should say were put together by the five of us who are co-PIs on this RCN. And it was interesting to see how this slide evolved and the different ideas that even just within our team we had about the tools and approaches. So you can think about that in terms of how do we make measurements? Do we use wells? Do we use seismic data? Are we looking at chemistry of the water? And then also how do we interpret these data? And I was thinking about when I was tackling this question is if we want to do this we need to make sure that data are available. And so I put in the FAIR logo, I'm sure some of you have heard about this, making sure that our data are available and shared so that all scientists can get at them and access them and use them. And then also how do we interpret data? A lot of data we interpret via the use of models, both refining our data and then also modeling to understand different outcomes that we're seeing in our data. So I put up there CSDMS, which of course I am a part of and I am maybe a little bit biased towards, but many different modeling efforts can help how we interpret the CZ and how we use the data that are being collected and shared. All right, this one is quite a big question and I'm just going to summarize this question with how do we understand the CZ architecture? What controls the CZ architecture? And that can mean many things depending on what type of a scientist you are. And so for you, for some people the CZ architecture might be from the canopy to the surface is where they're really focusing on and then it's the water goes into the subsurface. For some people, they're really focusing on the subsurface and then some people are looking at fluxes all throughout, okay? But that architecture, be it through the type of vegetation that's there, how fractured the rock is, that controls functioning. And then similarly that functioning feeds back to control things like porosity. So one of my co-authors put here, this is a chicken and egg type problem and you can very quickly get lost in the details of what's controlling what and how does the functioning feedback, which way are the loops going? And this is tough and this is why we need multiple people from many different viewpoints tackling these plushies. All right, this one is one that's near and dear to my heart as a geomorphologist. So I put up an image here that is from Leonard Scholar and co-authors paper. And this is how did the land surface in the lower CZ boundary co-evolved, all right? And just through again, by speaking with my co-authors, we have different definitions of what the lower CZ boundary is, all right? And for some of us, it's that boundary where you start to break up the rock and we might describe it in a physical way and not a chemical way. Other people might describe it differently. But how that evolves can affect the depth of soil or the amount of sap or like the grain size. And then that in turn can affect this land surface, how much relief, the slope of the land surface, what type of vegetation is there. And so this co-evolution and what controls what is really important for understanding critical zone function. All right, is the CZ responding to the great acceleration of the Anthropocene? And I found this image, this is just off of a webpage, but I sort of loved it because it takes into account many things that I don't necessarily think about when I think about the Anthropocene affecting the critical zone, but for example, even air quality can affect the type of vegetation which can play back. Oftentimes I'm thinking about what you see in letter A there, how does farming in land practices or off the letter R there, which looks to be deforestation, that really can have huge impacts on critical zone functioning. And how this is going to affect what we have studied in the past and what we have learned based on past critical zone functioning is really an open question. All right, and then another one is how do we upscale small scale understanding to large scale representation? And this also tackles problems of temporal or questions of temporal scales and how do we cross boundaries both temporally and spatially. And for me in my head as a geomorphologist and hydrologist, I think of this in terms of these photos or these photos of soil pits from Emma Harris and at Scripps, where you're looking at a very localized soil properties. And then we want to sort of scale out to say a whole hill slope or even a whole watershed. What we learn from a soil pit and even a soil pit as any of you dog them know, they can be very intensive and a lot of work, but they're still very localized. But they tell us a lot about what's going on in the landscape. And so we're never going to have soil pits across 100% of the landscape, but how do we take those point measurements that we make any kind of point measurement and scale them up both across space and time. All right, and so we as a team have come together and we have said that in order to tackle these five questions, we really need to diversify the CC community and open up, make sure that early career scientists know about CC scientists, know that they are welcome in the CC science community. And that groups that maybe have not traditionally been part of the CC community know that they're welcome and know that they can contribute. Because we really feel that a wide range of voices is going to help us to tackle these wide ranging and quite important questions. Okay. So what we're planning, so we have a pot of money that NSF and the taxpayers have entrusted us with to tackle these questions and bring in a more inclusive and diverse community. And what we have currently planned to do is first starting off with that series of quasi webinars. That's going to be starting in January 2020, but we don't have an exact date yet. But I promise we will share that soon. And that is going to be an introduction to some of the topics that I've already presented here and going into more depth on the science and starting to develop an inclusive vocabulary so that the geochemists can talk with the data science people and the data science people can talk with the numerical modelers and the hydrologists and so on, so that we can start to really tackle these questions in different ways than maybe has been done in the past. And then also introduce some of the basics of CC science to those who are new to the field. So we would really encourage early career, even undergraduate scientists, to be involved in these webinars. And then our first meeting, we're going to have a series of five meetings, one annually. And our first meeting will be held in late June, June 22nd through 25th in Golden Colorado. So that's going to be on the campus of Colorado School of Minds. And what we want to do there is first tackle these questions and put our minds together and talk about the tools that we can use to tackle these questions. We might have things like hackathons and brainstorming sessions where we can start to think about what scientists need to come together to attack these different questions. But then we also want to make sure we have a wide range of scientists in all terms of wide ranging in any way that you can think about that at this meeting. And that's going to be our goal for all of our meetings. Some of the meetings in later years will be more focused on particular science questions. So we have those group of science questions that we have put forward, but as we move forward with our our CN, if the community decides that we need to tweak those questions or move them in different directions, that's what we'll do. And those particular focuses will be the years two, three and four will be more focused on particular science questions and less, less broad than the first meeting. And then again, in the last year, we'll come together for another broad meeting. OK, so I think many of you probably joined us because you're wondering how can you you join this webinar because you're wondering how you can work with us. And in particular, there's the new critical zone call from NSF, and that is due in early December. Those proposals are due in early December. And we as a team, our CN think that we can possibly work with you if you're interested. And if you think your science lines up with some of the science that we would like to tackle through our CN, we can work with you on your broader impacts. In particular, because we are putting together, we are spending a lot of time and effort to figure out how we can reach diverse communities and bring them together. We want to share that with you. We want to help you plug into those communities. And so if it works out as part of your CZ and NSF proposal or as part of any other proposal that you're working on, be it a graduate research proposal, a postdoc proposal, or a more disciplinary focused proposal, but that has a CZ been to it. We can work with you on your broader impacts. We can partner and work together so that we if we have common goals. So if you, for example, we're thinking of running a meeting as part of your proposal or project, we can help you with that. We can help you reach different communities. We can help you run your your meeting in a way that will create an environment where everyone feels more comfortable and where people feel more comfortable to share their ideas and reach others. OK, so we're working on that. And we would love to share our ideas with you so that you can have the most productive meeting. Similarly, NSF encouraged us to include more undergraduates and students in our meetings. And of course, we were at a limited budget just like you will. So if you want to partner with us and support, say more students to come to our meetings, that would be fantastic. And we can work with you. We can talk with you about that. Similarly, we are you'll see there was a website and I apologize, I didn't point it out, but it will come up again. We are just I mean, really, really just as in the last few days, we started developing a website for our RCN. On that website, we're going to have all kinds of information both about CSD science and also about how people can become successful and balanced and thriving scientists, OK, both in the broader scientific community and in academia. And so we would love to have on our website both scientific information as far as the details of CSD science, but also support for, say, best practices for spinning up an NSF proposal or best practices for managing a team project and things like that. We plan to cover both of those in our webinars throughout the five years that we will be doing this RCN. And so if you have ideas for that, we would love to have you join in on our webinars. You don't have you can attend them. Of course, you can also give one and we can support you with that. And that can be part of your broader impacts. You can help us find materials for our website. Or if you have a website that you want us to link to, we would love to do that. Basically, we're open to working with you if you feel that our goals coincide with your goals and that together we can make a stronger community. All right, so here's the final slide and here's how you can contact us. So we're listed here in alphabetical order. This is I happen to be first and I happen to be given the webinar today. But all five of us are very deeply engaged in this effort and you can see there the URL for our Google site. Unfortunately, my university blocks Google site, so I haven't even seen this site yet, but I know that we are just getting this up and running. But if there's ways that we can work together, take a look and see what we have there. And then please, if you're interested in attending our workshop or you want to send your students postdocs, undergraduates, mark your calendars. We're going to advertise and open up applications probably in early 2020 for our first workshop and meeting and then also our upcoming webinars. And I think from there we can start to take questions. Pam, I don't know if you want to unmute or. Yeah, I haven't seen any questions come up yet in the actual chat box, but I think that this does give us a little opportunity to have everyone kind of moment about, you know, how, how this, what other information might you need or how might you be able to pair with us? Whatever questions you might have. I did also want to say that as a part of this, there's a lot of tools that we'll be developing and parts of workshops that will be dedicated to career development. And I think that that's also an important aspect that will come with these workshops. So that everybody's aware of that too. Great. So you can see that Pam posted the the URL for our site and also this is going to we will this has been recorded this webinar. And so it will be available through the CSDMS website. So Stephanie says no questions right now, but thanks for this. Thank you for coming and participating. I know that I guess one of the things that I overheard the other day, which I thought was really awesome, was that, you know, that even more so, our funding agencies are going to be pressing upon us, you know, for for inclusion and diversity, and we really need everyone's efforts towards going towards that. Kennedy, do you want to ask a question? I have one from Sharon that popped up right now that says, are you proposing to share the costs of travel for those undergraduates who might participate in another conference as part of your RCN or and as part of our grants? So I think that that's an area for discussion that we'd like to have. But we have a certain pool of money that we have available. And so however we can leverage that pool of money, Sharon, so that we can create the most diverse and inclusive group of individuals together, that's what we're we're looking to achieve. Yeah, that's what we're hoping to. So Sharon said it seems like a great way to maximize undergraduate participation. And we feel like it's the same as well. You know, we have this opportunity to be able to leverage, you know, a little bit of extra funds. And that actually brings a lot of other individuals to join our team. But in case it's not clear, we do have funds in our pool of money to offset costs to attend our conferences. So our intention is that participating in the activities that we have proposed for our RCN don't come as a cost to other research. So students certainly will be funded to participate in our workshops. So Kennedy asked another question, and maybe Nicole can help us answer this one. Is there shared resources, e.g. computational platforms, network computing, et cetera, that might be available? So that's a great question and not through our RCN, per se, but I think through community efforts like, for example, CSDMS, you can often access HPC computing. And so and that would be something that through our networks, we can figure out the best way to access that type of computing if you needed it. So I'm not sure if I answered the question there. Let me check. Yeah, I think that that's a really good point. Like one of the key parts of these RCNs is that we're helping to develop networks, right? And networks are what are going to help people to be able to ask questions that cut across sites, that cut across different systems that use both data and integrate to working with individuals who may be more modelers. Yeah, and one of the ideas that that we had is like I said, at the meetings, we can possibly have hackathons. Or we can have small workshops for introduction to particular models or modeling tools or even accessing high performance computing if needed. And I think those kinds of things will come together as we start to see what people's interests are in the meetings so that we can sort of tailor to the people that want to attend the meeting and want to participate. So we'll be actually at Colorado School of Mines. We'll be right down the road from CSDMS. So possibly we can tap into their resources via me to figure out how we can use community resources and community computing to tackle some of the questions that will help us advance CC science. And in that same vein, we are also down the road from from neon. So our one of our goals is to be able to help establish our kind of more critical zone network using the data facilities that are brought upon by me on as well. Hey, this is Julia Perdriel. Thank you so much for for the webinar. I think this is really helpful. And I'm so glad because I just saw it yesterday, popping through the listserv and kind of spontaneously joined. And yeah, to me, this makes so much sense. And I'm excited about this. What was your preferred means of us contacting you or checking in with you? We'll just email you. Yeah, I think you can email any of us. And then we will put you in contact with all of us. So if you can get down one of these emails, that will be fine. And then we can set up either a chat if we need to or talk the email as to how we can work together. Thanks, Sharon. Sharon said, this is awesome to see coming to fruition. We're really excited about it. And it's really does depend a lot upon the kind of input we're getting from the community. Right. So this is just the first of our conversations, but we we're hoping to have many more. Yeah, and I would emphasize that. Although I think we're pretty interdisciplinary, we. We of course, don't represent the entire community. And we're open to your ideas, too, as to how we should take these questions forward and refine them. And that is absolutely something we plan to do. And I also want to emphasize that you can work with us, even if you're not submitting a critical zone proposal to the next MSF call, I think there's many ways in which people could be interested in working with us. And we're open to that and open to hearing from you. So we have another question. Do you intend to have training sessions as well knowing that we have diverse backgrounds? I mean, I think that's one of the things that we have really focused on is because we have diverse backgrounds, some of it's some of the challenges we have is even just having conversations with each other, using the same vocabulary and coming together as really different disciplinary scientists. So what I would hope is that, say, we had a training session that might be an introductory, introductory on something that someone was an expert on. We would want some of the experts to be there, too, so that we can make sure we were all starting together with the same terminology, the same language, the same ideas. Or if we don't have the same ideas, why is that and where do we need to refine? So I think, you know, certainly we're going to have a series of webinars and I would not expect that one person is going to attend every single webinar, but I hope that we can get diverse voices both scientifically and otherwise at those webinars. Yeah, I think a big part of is like lowering the barrier to being able to do this kind of convergent thinking, this kind of, you know, cross-discipline conversation. And I think a huge part of that is putting people in the room and having everyone kind of go at problems from their own angles and hearing the discussion that comes from that. And training sessions can actually help you to do that, I think, to some degree, because everybody's kind of getting together around a specific thing. And that can be really helpful. And, you know, everyone can be lifting each other up as you go through it. Any questions? There's one question that we have coming on, which says, this may be in the proposal, but do you have an idea of what kind of research product would be developed to help with vocabulary? Something that helps with educating, standardizing and deciding on shared sets of vocabulary. For example, it usually takes three years to develop a shared vocabulary in a small group. Do you have some magic up your sleeves? I appreciate that question. I think probably Kamini has the magic. We can blame her because she's not here. So, yeah, that's a great question. And as far as I know, we do not have any magic. But I think at least my understanding is that there's not going to be any shared vocabulary if we don't start. And yes, it might take a long time. And yes, it might be a tough road. But I think we need to start getting that shared vocabulary and how do we get the word out there via website, via publication? I don't know, actually. I don't know if Pam or Nikki want to weigh in on that. I know Nikki has thought a lot about this idea of shared vocabulary. And I'll let her speak and see if she wants to follow up on that. But one thing I think that is true is that by having kind of a constant communication that's supported over the next five years, that is one way to create a little bit of magic. That's exactly, I think, Pam, what I was thinking. So there have been a lot of more discipline-specific workshops over the last five to 10 years. And I think through the previous batch of early career researchers, we've started building a shared vocabulary. And it's really only going to strengthen and become more concrete as we continue to bring in newer researchers to CZ Science so that it just becomes fluent. Because we're definitely still in the building of this right now. And I think because this is a five-year program and we have meetings and webinars set up for the entirety of the next five years, the theme of a common vocabulary is going to keep coming back over and over again. So the way that the meetings are set up in the proposal is that we start in year one with a big meeting. So 75 to 80 participants from all sub-disciplines in a very intense and focused interaction where we're aimed at a very specific science problem or science questions that we've outlined in this talk. But then as we go through the following three years, we dig in in smaller groups. And within each of these groups, making sure that there's representation and spokes people from each of these subfields so that when we reconvene four or five years from now, that the developing and emerging vocabulary is really permeated through the sub-disciplines. And we can start the next set of we ask the next set of research questions. And we all know what each other is talking about. But it does take a while, and we are cognizant of that. And we've programmed that in to what our efforts are. Kennedy asked another question. Can this include sharing site access data and instrumentation even if informally? At least from our standpoint, we're trying to be as accessible and transparent as possible. We've put our proposal in its entirety up on our website. So you can call any information from that that any participant can access that. From if you mean sites as in actual research sites or observatory sites, that isn't what isn't really within our domain of control. But any data, any new data or ideas that come out of our meetings will certainly be publicly available. And I would like to stress, I think, that one of the things that you're aiming to do is encourage individuals to come with their data in seeking partners to work at these RCN, whether that be modelers or different empiricists or individuals who's a geomorphologist or someone who might be a structural geologist who knows. But the idea is to bring your data sets around these kinds of questions to help maybe find some partners for you. And so we would like to facilitate this ability to have informal cross-sharing of sites and data and instrumentation. And part of that is by building your network. The more you build your network and meet individuals, the better you understand these different places and where they're coming from, what the heritage of those sites might be or that data might be. And that will allow for us to actually start to bring some of this together. And it looks like Sharon shared a link to a book, How Generalists Are a Trim Thing in a Specialized World. Thanks, Sharon. Thank you, Sharon. So we have one more question. Will this RCN connect to international critical zone efforts? We would, speaking from my behalf and the conversations we've had in the past, yes, we are very, very hopeful that we can connect to international critical zone efforts. The idea is to be able to interact with the larger community and not just those who claim or who have been part of formal critical zone, maybe establishments in their own countries, but anyone who recognizes that this is kind of this type of science that they would like to be conducting. Nikki or Nicole, do you have any other thoughts on that? Yeah, I would say that absolutely, because if we want to have diverse thought, there's diverse thought is across the blue. The challenges are going to be cost. But then again, that's why we're looking to partner with others so that we can be as inclusive as possible. And certainly, via webinars, we would love to hear feedback as to how we can reach groups that are international more so than we have already. So that would be one. Yes, I guess that would be an important part for us. If you know of a listserv or a data stream, some sort for us to be able to announce things so that they hit your community, please send that to us so that when we're ready and we're dispensing information, we can ensure that we get that information to your community as well. Yes, this webinar is recorded. That was a question. And we will make it available online on that same website that we put forward before. We would love for you to share it with any of your Co-P guys. Thank you very much. Yeah, hopefully you can still see the slide. Is everyone able to still see the slide? Yeah. OK. I can't really stress enough how much we would love to get your feedback as to how we can do this better and how we can make this really successful. So please be in contact with us. We'd love to hear. I mean, it takes a lot of effort to come to a webinar. And we appreciate that. And we know that if you want to drop us a line because you have resources or you want to be involved, we'd love to hear from you. Other questions? Oh, what about a Slack channel? Do you have one or plan to have one? We actually discussed this. I am not sure where we've landed on it yet. But that is something we're definitely thinking about. So if that's something that our community wants, then I think we'll figure out a way to make it happen. Yeah. As Nikki or Pam, did you want to share any other thoughts? Only that, as you spread the word to new people and students or want to participate, the application for the first conference is on our website. And we just ask that you let us know that you're interested in participating by the end of the year so that we can start making plans for the summer. Well, let me just say thank you again. And we really hope to hear from more of you as we move forward and to work together with you.