Assisted Migration is an understudied, but potentially controversial, strategy that aims to preserve species threatened by global warming by purposefully transporting organisms to regions they are projected to occupy under climate change. Assisted migration aims to overcome dispersal barriers associated with habitat loss, rapid climatic change, and sedentary life history traits. A workshop will be held to evaluate this nascent conservation strategy in the light of current ecological knowledge about the biotic and abiotic forces influencing species distributions. The goal is to integrate scientific information and uncertainty, so as to provide the first evaluation and plan-of-study for assisted migration. This meeting will result in a critical evaluation of the potential benefits and dangers of assisted migration, as well as the potential challenges of its implementation. This project will help to facilitate strong intellectual, professional and networking advances for participants, which will lead to future collaborations and help to build intellectual infrastructure. It will also support the active participation of graduate students, and provide an opportunity to develop a curriculum module (on global change and species extinction) for K-12 science classes. The products emerging from this workshop will help facilitate this dialogue by clearly articulating the strengths and limitations of current scientific understanding of relevant ecological and evolutionary processes.
