2025 Neukom CompX Faculty Grants Awarded

Text from the Neukom Institute fro Computaional Science. Full article linked here.

About the CompX Faculty Grants Program
Winners of the 2025-2026 Neukom Institute CompX Faculty Grants Program for Dartmouth faculty have been announced for one-year projects. We received over $1.3million in total requests and awarded a combination of funds, Neukom Scholar RA support, and research computing support for a total of $378K. The program seeks to fund both the development of novel computational techniques as well as the application of computational methods to research across the campus and professional schools. Dartmouth College faculty including the undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools were eligible to apply for these competitive grants.

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Geography
Jonathan Chipman

Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Hyperspectral Images to Enable Alpine Zone Ecological Research
Cold climate ecosystems in the Arctic and on mountains are undergoing rapid environmental change in response to human alterations of the earth's climate and biogeochemical systems. In the northeastern USA and eastern Canada, an archipelago of scattered high peaks rise above the treeline and host tundra-like landscapes ("alpine zones") dominated by cold-tolerant herbaceous plants and dwarf woody shrubs. While studies on a handful of these summits have shown that the treeline is rising (Tourville et al., 2023), much less is known about ecological changes inside the alpine zone itself, such as "alpine greening" and "alpine shrubification". These peaks are also notably affected by other forms of environmental change beyond warming, such as air quality/atmospheric deposition and extraordinarily high recreational use. For this reason, they have been proposed as sensitive biomonitors of environmental change (Kimball & Weihrauch, 2000).
With this CompX grant, we will collaborate with scientists at the northeast's premier conservation NGO, the Appalachian Mountain Club, to collect field data and extensive remote sensing imagery at key alpine biodiversity sites above treeline in New Hampshire's White Mountains. The remote sensing component will include a suite of advanced multispectral and hyperspectral imaging systems and high-resolution lidar. The resulting spectral and lidar data will be used for high-resolution mapping of ecological communities and will serve as a "resolution bridge" to connect field data to coarser-scale satellite imagery, which can then be used to study changes over time in these alpine ecosystems.

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Geography & Anthropology
Sarah Kelly & Charis Boke

Building a Community Science Tool for Inland Flooding in Vermont
This project is informed by community-based research in the Black, White, and Ottauquechee River basins. Our research shows a need for improved technical infrastructure for knowledge transfer at different levels of response to stormwater management and flooding disasters. With community partners, we create a multidirectional process to close this knowledge transfer gap. We use mixed methods social science research and computing technologies to inform development of this new technical infrastructure. The two objectives are: 1) to build an open-source phone application for community monitoring of stormwater infrastructure and flooding risks; 2) to build a website to enhance public access to relevant data visualization.

Full article linked here.