Biodiversity on Earth -- comprising an estimated 10 million or more different species -- provides crucial ecosystem services to the planet, including the cycling of nutrients, gases, and water, provision of food, medicine, energy, and shelter. Because biodiversity is essential to the health of the planet, it is important to understand how it is generated, maintained and lost. This topic, however, is extraordinarily complex. Biodiversity distribution patterns and ecosystem services are regulated by processes that operate across multiple hierarchical levels of organization, temporal dimensions, and spatial scales. This Research Coordination Network brings together a diverse set of researchers to integrate data and explore novel concepts that will rapidly advance the field. Researchers will explicitly investigate processes that span hierarchical levels to identify novel properties that could not have been predicted by investigating the individual parts alone. Biologists working at different scales of organization will lead the effort, in coordination with researchers with expertise in machine learning, modeling, and mathematics to ensure the required cyberinfrastructure will advance in sync with new biodiversity and ecological forecasting theory. Annual meetings and workshops will offer diverse training opportunities in biodiversity informatics and scientific communication to students and faculty. The network will establish student research immersion opportunities and extensive cross-disciplinary training through exchanges among biodiversity, environmental biology, and computer sciences laboratories at the collaborating institutions. Based on participant feedback, the Research Coordination Network will adapt best student-centric practices of collaborative research, and report them to the scientific community. Envisioned products include perspective, synthetic, proof-of-concept, and data-driven publications, and presentations at scientific meetings, webinars, and learning modules. The project also will provide outstanding education and networking opportunities to scientists at different career levels, institutions, and cultural backgrounds, contributing to the establishment of a diverse and well-trained workforce in the U.S.
The non-linearity of the complex mechanisms regulating biodiversity and ecological processes makes predictions difficult, and requires diverse data and novel analytical methods to make forecasting more accurate. This Research Coordination Network promotes convergence by bringing together a diverse set of biologists, environmental biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians to explore the cross-scale processes regulating the Rules of Life, and the theory, models, and cyberinfrastructure needed to analyze them. This Research Coordination Network will focus on four major topics: 1) how to incorporate cross-scale processes into models of biodiversity patterns and predictions about the ecosystem functions they provide; 2) exploration and expansion of novel biodiversity monitoring approaches to better understand patterns and processes acting across scales (particularly through the use of proximal and remote sensing methods); 3) challenges and possible solutions in bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure to foster new ways to handle storage, integration, and visualization of complex biological and environmental data; and 4) novel approaches to enhance public awareness about the complexity, value, and role of biodiversity. This convergence approach promises to provide novel insights into fundamental questions about biodiversity and ecological forecasting that will have a broad impact on the biological sciences, and society more generally.
