Director's Statement     |    Facilities

What a year it has been.  This year, ICESS has welcomed new opportunities, faced tremendous challenges, and sustained terrible losses.  Starting with the saddest and getting to the good news later, ICESS lost three participants this past year.  In September 2005, one of our core PIs, Leal Mertes, lost on her hard-fought battle against cancer.  In November 2005, one of my graduate students, Jon Klamberg, who recently completed his Master's degre e, passed away.  In April 2006, Walter Rosenthal laid down his life in an effort to save two colleagues on Mammoth Mountain.  All three deaths have been hard f elt throughout ICESS.  Leal, Jon, and Walter continue to be deeply missed by our community.

On happier notes, PI Jeff Dozier, former Assistant Director of ICESS and Professor and founding Dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, received the William T. Pecora Award from NASA and the USGS in recognition of his scientific excellence and leadership in snow hydrology, remote sensing, and information systems.  Additionally, two of our graduate students, Chantal Swan and Crow White received Outstanding Student Paper awards from the American Geophysical Union.

Student participation at ICESS has remained strong and spans across research areas.  Our students play key roles in research efforts addressing everything from biodiversity modeling to climate prediction to the design of marine protected areas to watershed modeling and beyond.  The quality of their work is demonstrated by their success in obtaining fellowship funding, both through NASA and other agencies.  All three new NASA Fellowship submis sions this year resulted in awards and we had six fellowships active during 2006.

Overall research funding for ICESS investigators has remained fairly constant for the past several years.  Last fiscal year's funding levels were somewhat lower than the previous year's total.  However this resulted from few day delay in processing of a single large award until after the close of fiscal year.  So far in the first three months of the 2006-07 fiscal year, we have already received over 90% of last year's funding levels.   This is great news considering the dismal times which face all U.S. researchers in the Earth and environmental sciences. Clearly, the credit belongs to the great research proposals created and conducted by our participants.  UCSB continues to be among the world's leaders in interdisciplinary Earth system science. 

While the science completed daily at ICESS remains strong, I remain deeply concerned with the directions that NASA has taken this past year and the impact those changes may have on ICESS and global change research in the United States for the years to come.  Last year, I served on NASA's agency- level strategic roadmap committee on Earth Science and Applications (SRM9).  Throughout our process, we were told that the NASA mission statement would always include "... understand and protect our home planet."  This year, that statement of commitment to our planet was removed without community or advisory committee consultation.  It appears that NASA may sacrifice science (not just Earth science) in order to meet the commitments of the President's Vision for Space Exploration.  Cutting Earth science to focus on the manned exploration of the Moon and Mars leaves the nation without the Earth observations it needs in this most critical time of global change a time when we need every opportunity to observe, understand and appropriately respond to the changes that are occurring.   That said, these changes are occurring and eventually they will affect the research support given to many ICESS participants. 

ICESS continues to build upon the SPOT Resource Center initiated last year in collaboration with a local company, Terra Image, USA. So far, this partnership provides UCSB researchers and students with nearly unlimited access to high spatial resolution commercial satellite imagery from the SPOT constellation of satellite sensors. High spatial resolution imagery are commercial products and have been virtually unobtainable to academic researchers due to their high cost.  Due to this new program, UCSB researchers can acqu ire high spatial resolution scenes, comparable to aerial photography, allowing one to view and study buildings, trees, cars, kelp forests and the impacts people make on the Earth. To date, we have archived over 35,000 scenes for use by UCSB and have involved participants from ICESS, Geography, the Bren School, Chemistry, ECE, EEMB, Environmental Studies, Earth Sciences, the Institute for Crustal Studies, IQCD, MSI, NCEAS, and Physics.  We have also worked throug hout the year with Terra Image, USA, on efforts to expand this program and hope to be able to announce this expansion in the near future.  My continued thanks go out to the staff in Business Services, Administrative Services, and the Office of Research for their efforts and the continued support we have received from the Vice Chancellor for Research (Mike Witherell) and the Dean of Sciences (Martin Moskovits).

As with each unit on campus, continued budget cuts have impacted our overburdened staff.  The already long-hours worked by the administrative and compute staff have expanded with the addition of the SPOT program (and its planning for the future).  Their dedication, creativity, commitment, and excellence have continued in spite of the challenges of every-increasing workloads.  I thank each one of these exceptional team mem bers for allowing me (and the PIs of ICESS) to focus on research and research development while they keep infrastructure and our administration running without a glitch.  In prior reports, both the ICESS Advisory Committee and I have continuously to urge the UCSB administration to work with UCOP to addressthe significant staffing issues faced by our campus.  This need is becoming more critical each day and must be addressed soon.

As an Organized Research Unit at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the ICESS mission continues to be "to provide a distributed, interdisciplinary computer environment for the promotion and support of research and research education in Earth system science, an interdisciplinary environment and computer-related service that enhances the excellence and competitive advantage of UCSB global change research, a center of excellence to provide visibility and aid in the attraction of top faculty and students to UCSB, and an efficiently-run business operations and administration that supports research."

In all, I am very pleased with the advances ICESS has made in the past year.  In many ways, it was as tough a year as I can imagine. The fact that we have maintained our funding levels and kept research groups together and funded has been a laudable achievement by our academic participants and our staff.   With the addition of the new SPOT Program, ICESS can solidify its place in the center Earth science activity and build bridges to other programs, thereby creating new opportunities for UCSB and ICESS participants.&nb sp; I look forward to these exciting challenges.

                                    David A. Siegel, Director