FORTE (Frontlines Of Rapidly Transforming Ecosystems) is the first Earth Venture Suborbital (EVS) mission to apply the unique advantages of high resolution, ecosystem scale, and suborbital passive and active remote sensing observations to explicitly link hydrological, biogeochemical and ecological processes in Arctic land-ocean systems. FORTE will fill a critical gap in our mechanistic understanding and modeling of environmental change impacts by targeting the transitional continuum of Alaska’s northernmost and fast changing systems – eroding coastlines, rivers, deltas, and estuaries – that connect land to sea: a dynamic continuum that can uniquely be captured from suborbital and remote sensing platforms.
FORTE supports NASA’s Earth Science Division’s Earth Science to Action Strategy by focusing on real-world challenges relevant to changing coastal resources, water quality, and food security in the Arctic. Results from FORTE are expected to inform policy and decision making, and help vulnerable coastal communities prepare for the future, in the Arctic and beyond. FORTE measurements will focus on the North Slope of Alaska, a region characterized as a high priority area for coordinated monitoring of future environmental change across the Pan-Arctic. FORTE is founded on strong collaborations with local Indigenous communities to link research to local community priorities, inform this study based on local knowledge, co-develop training and two-way capacity-sharing programs, observe processes and seasonal changes between suborbital deployments, and sustain observations beyond this project’s lifetime.
This program element seeks to formulate the FORTE Science Team, which will be in place for a four-year period (spring 2026-2030) and will participate in a multi-year field campaign to address the science objectives of the FORTE mission. Due to the specific requirements of this program element, proposers are strongly encouraged to read this program element in its entirety. Failure to include a required section of the proposal will result in a proposal being returned to the proposing institution as nonresponsive.
Application Deadline: January 21, 2025 (Notice of Interest); April 21, 2025 (Full Proposals)
