Directors Statement

The mission of the Earth Research Institute (ERI) is to support research and education in the sciences of our solid, fluid, and living Earth. In the past fiscal year, ERI-affiliated faculty and researchers from across campus submitted 138 proposals requesting over $45 million in funding. During this same period, ERI welcomed 13 new PIs from across campus who either made their first submission or received their first award. During the past year, ERI researchers were instrumental in two new multi-campus projects supported by UC Labs Fees. Jeff Dozier  - in collaboration with 5 UC campuses and 3 National Labs - received a new award of $1,097,034 titled "Headwaters to groundwater: Resources in a changing climate" and Charles Jones was awarded $2,623,145 for his proposal "Mitigating and Managing Extreme Wildfire Risk in California" collaboration, which is a collaboration across three UC campuses. Here are a few of the many ERI-supported research highlights from 2019-2020:

• Vamsi Ganti, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography’s study reporting on how larger floods and changes in sediment will amplify the effects of sea level rise on the likelihood of river avulsions. Professor Ganti’s results, which appear in Geophysical Research Letters, warn of major disasters poised to hit many urban centers that historically never had to worry about these issues. 

• Researchers working in Professor Patricia Holden’s lab in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management received support from the Associated Students’ Coastal Fund to develop and apply techniques to use wastewater to monitor COVID-19 infection rates in the local community in collaboration with the El Estero Water Resource Center in Santa Barbara and the Montecito Sanitary District wastewater treatment plant.

• ERI Researcher and wildfire expert Max Moritz was featured in a lengthy New York Times article that highlighted the urgency of rethinking fire management policies as climate change threatens to make things worse: “Changes Needed Amid Worsening Wildfires”

• Environmental Studies Associate Professor Simone Pulver found that “super polluters” - a handful of industrial facilities that emit unusually high levels of toxic chemical pollution year after year -  account for the majority of annual industrial pollution across a large range of industries. Professor Pulver’s research - published Environmental Research Letters - has significant implications for the regulation of toxic pollution and suggests that major reductions to pollution could be achieved by focusing on a relatively small number of facilities doing the most polluting.

Over the past year, ERI has continued to strengthen its role as a campus leader in research computing. In addition to supporting our PIs, we have entered into an agreement to provide research computing support for the Department of Geography. Research computing is central to ERI’s support of our researchers. In a survey of our PIs conducted in December of 2019, research computing was rated as at least moderately important by 88% of our respondents, and data storage was rated as at least moderately important by 81% of respondents. Satisfaction with ERI computing is extremely high. The ERI compute environment and staff bring a “can do” approach to the mission of enabling research. ERI’s infrastructure provides a cost effective solution to data storage and computing by combining shared resources with researcher-specific needs.  The ability to implement researcher-specific computing & storage environments on top of stable, reliable, and shared hardware makes it possible to serve our diverse PIs well while still maintaining high efficiency. By using open source software, commodity hardware, and investing in staff expertise, ERI-IT is able to minimize the cost for research IT while providing compute resources that are secure, agile, and  robust. ERI-IT staff have research backgrounds and are actively involved with the wider campus IT community, which helps provide researchers access to the resources and/or support they need when not available locally or are more cost-effective using campus resources. The ERI-IT team works closely with PIs and Graduate Students in order to nurture creativity while increasing collaboration and productivity.  Our PI Survey, conducted in December of 2019, provided the following testimonials to ERI’s IT team:

• “Best on campus.”

• “Computing in ERI is unparalleled.”

• “The IT support I receive from ERI has been invaluable to my career over the past 5 years. I don't know what I would do without them."

The ERI computing environment already functions effectively as an “on-site cloud service” for our researchers and staff.  Based on current costs, we are able to provide this computing environment at 1/4th to 1/10th the cost of commercial cloud providers such as AWS without the need for additional training.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many challenges this year to the Administrative Staff. With a day's notice we moved all staff off campus to working remotely and continued providing excellent service to all our faculty, researchers and staff. We struggled to quickly adjust our policies and procedures as campus released updates and guidance. In some areas we have seen workloads increase due to the intricacies of all processes being electronic, but our staff have continued to work tirelessly to support our customers. We feel fortunate that our staff have stayed healthy and dedicated to ERI during this very difficult time. ERI staff were also instrumental in maintaining support for the GUS financial administrative system, both in general and in response to new challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. ERI computing staff were able to quickly identify - and resolve - issues with off-site networking, and made sure researchers and staff had access to remote computing resources as easily and efficiently as possible. Much of this response flowed naturally from our prior experience facilitating remote work for our PIs and staff. ERI’s Director of IT, Michael Colee, serves on the Ellison Hall Building Committee and in that group identified a number of issues with the UCSB Building Access Monitor (BAM) application. As a result of that the ERI IT team built and deployed the TraQR utility which has a number of strengths over the BAM application. The TraQR system is now being used in Ellison, Girvetz, and Phelps and is available in GitHub.

This past year, ERI established a Graduate Student and Postgraduate Researcher committee in order to increase interactions across academic units, allow for shared training, and to garner feedback from this participant group. Thus far, the committee has recommended changes to our administrative website, created links between academic units in order to share information re: training opportunities, and has begun planning for an Earth-as-Art competition. ERI has also established a DEI working group comprising five faculty representatives from its constitutive departments. The goals of the group are to (1) identify ways ERI can aid faculty in their DEI initiatives, (2) compare departmental strategies and share resources and ideas, and (3) explore opportunities for collaborative efforts among the departments (e.g. HBCU-UCOP or HSI grants). The group met once in November and plans to meet quarterly thereafter. 

ERI’s research topics - environmental hazards, climate change, and environmental degradation - are some of the most societally resonant issues both nationally and locally. The citizens, communities, and industries of southern California are particularly eager to support research that can inform their decision making in service of environmental resilience. ERI has engaged with these communities directly through the efforts of our PIs, and this engagement has led to new donor support and increased visibility for the UCSB researchers and faculty within ERI. Despite the turbulent economic conditions created by COVID-19, the past decade has been one of continuous economic growth and rates of donor giving to education and research are currently above their 10-year, 25-year, and 40-year annualized averages. In just the past year there have been major gifts of $750 million for climate research to CalTech (Nov, 2019) and $19.3 million to William & Mary for an Institute for Integrative Conservation (Dec, 2019). These investments demonstrate the importance of a more strategic and holistic approach - that includes ERI -  as a means of increasing donor support for campus environmental research.

The next five years present an opportunity to build on our track record of administrative excellence to provide greater strategic leadership, communication & outreach, and increased efforts related to donor/foundation support for our faculty and researchers. Currently, there are 108 faculty on campus who are either active in ERI or conduct ERI-related science. We expect to lose at least 18 faculty members between now and 2025 due to retirement, although some losses will be offset by current searches. Accounting for these approved positions, we anticipate that there will be 96 faculty members conducting ERI-related science in 2025, a net loss of 12 faculty members from the present state.  There are a few areas of ERI Science that either are severely impacted now or will be shortly due to faculty separations. These areas include paleobiology, sedimentary geology, landscape ecology/ biogeography, evolutionary ecology, geomorphology, cryospheric science, limnology, environmental anthropology, and urban environmental science. Even with approved and on-going searches, we still face net losses in areas of Earth and Environmental Sciences that have been strengths of UCSB and are likely to be critical to growing campus’s research and scholarship. The departures of retired and expected retiring faculty members will dramatically diminish campus prestige in the Earth and Environmental Sciences. For UCSB to maintain its prominence in Earth & Environmental Sciences, there will be a need to increase our targeted recruitments for mid-career faculty and these efforts should be paired with initiatives to increase diversity amongst the faculty. 

The trend towards greater funding for transdisciplinary research and graduate training opportunities is well-established across the natural sciences. Furthermore, this trend is particularly pronounced in ERI, as our researchers continue to broaden our core focus on Earth & Environmental Sciences into aspects of social sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and policy. While it is unreasonable to expect that the academic structure of our divisions and departments will be able to (or even should try to) track these trends, ERI is well-placed to serve as a “center of convergence” that can lower the activation energy required for major new initiatives to occur.  There is a very real sense that right now - with respect to Earth & Environmental Sciences - UCSB is only the sum of its parts. New initiatives such as the Office of Research’s Iterative Eden Project point the way towards a more holistic approach to Earth & Environmental Sciences research at UCSB that effectively communicates and leverages the many strengths we have across campus. ERI is eager to continue to work with the Office of Research and its contributing academic departments to ensure that UCSB’s academic excellence and prestige in the Earth and Environmental Sciences are sustained within campus and are communicated more clearly without. 

In the coming years, ERI expects to continue its leadership in research IT. Our IT group is universally well-regarded by our PIs and their services are critical to our users. The success of this group - and its campus-wide reputation for excellence - has led to new responsibilities, and this growth should have already led to increased staffing. Without additional IT staff, we will have to either scale back our services for all users or start limiting the number of new researchers and PIs that we work with. The growth of new data science focused graduate training programs within ERI-affiliated units such as the Bren School’s Masters in Environmental Data Science, the Department of Geography’s GIScience Masters degree, and the proposed Environmental Data Science NRT program suggest that a rationing model would be a mistake. Instead, we are hopeful that we will be able to grow into these new opportunities for ERI’s IT team to lead in the creation and maintenance of a new generation of research computing environments.  We expect that in the coming years our IT environments will continue to consist of containerized/virtualized computing systems that allow researchers and students to scale their efforts from their laptops through ERI’s computing infrastructure and - where necessary - all the way up to massive cloud computing systems. Again, we see ERI as a nexus for research computing across campus and we are eager to increase our capacity to serve our PIs through expanding our staff to meet our growing demand.

The geography of UCSB’s campus - a gorgeous location surrounded by the ocean on three sides, an airport on the other, and entirely subject to regulation by the California Coastal Commission - will always serve as a constraint on the availability of modern space for laboratories and facilities. In response to the critical shortfall for environmental lab space, the ERI Director has been collaborating with the Bren School, the Department of Environmental Studies, the Department of Earth Science, and the Natural Reserve System, to develop a proposal for a new Environmental Laboratory & Computing building. This effort is still in the early planning stages, but would provide new administrative and office space for ERI staff and researchers, freeing up office space in Ellison for other uses. In addition, the building will house designated laboratory space for ERI researchers, who currently do not have dedicated lab spaces, and shared laboratory facilities including field prep areas, environmental chambers for sensor testing and development, and common analytical equipment. These shared facilities will be a first step towards a more intentional and comprehensive planning effort related to Environmental research facilities across campus, which have been historically determined almost entirely through individual startup negotiations and retention offers. The ERI Director is also a member of the Office of Research’s Space Committee, which is seeking to provide a more thorough assessment of laboratory spaces across campus as the first step of a multi-year strategic planning process. 

As we enter 2020-2021, we are hopeful that we will be able to assess our impact across campus via our external review, which was delayed last spring due to the COVID pandemic. We also remain excited about the emerging opportunities we see to contribute to campus-wide efforts related to data science and cyberinfrastructure, and to continue to support UCSB’s world-class faculty and researchers engaged in Earth and Environmental Science. This annual report provides a snapshot of the Earth Research Institute in 2019-2020, the research we do, and the impact of these efforts.

Kelly Caylor

Director, Earth Research Institute