The NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Program’s Support of the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI): Focus on Non-boreal Europe

Currently, the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) includes over 120 international projects involving more than 200 scientific institutions from over 30 countries. The program involves national government agencies, academia and private organizations in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Northern Eurasia (Gutman 2007). The NEESPI science is directed at evaluating the role of anthropogenic impacts on the Northern Eurasia ecosystems, the hemispheric-scale interaction and assessing how future human actions would affect the global climate and ecosystems of the region. Projections of the consequences of global changes for regional environment in Northern Eurasia are also in the center of the scientific foci of this initiative. The Land-Cover/Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Program is an interdisciplinary science program in the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate supporting several regional initiatives, including NEESPI. The NASA LCLUC currently funds over 30 NEESPI projects. The NEESPI program links to several international projects, such as GLP, iLEAPS and others, under major international programs: IGBP and WCRP. The NEESPI covers a large geographic domain, which includes the former Soviet Union, northern China, Mongolia, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. This contribution provides a short description of the ongoing NEESPI studies in the non-boreal European sub-region of the NEESPI geographic domain that are supported by the NASA LCLUC program. More information on the projects can be found at http://neespi.org and http://lcluc.hq.nasa.gov.