Microbial eukaryotes harbor the greatest diversity within the eukaryotic tree of life yet remain understudied. These protist lineages can have large impacts on the health of ecosystems as primary producers or predators and on other species as symbionts or pathogens. Moreover, recent research has demonstrated a disparity between the relatively low number of formally described microbial eukaryote species and the much higher number of undescribed species inferred using DNA sequence data from environmental samples. Despite the clear need for more effort dedicated to characterizing these understudied lineages, the community of researchers in the United States who are trained for this work is dwindling and scattered among a variety of scientific fields. This workshop award will bring together scientists who focus on the systematic biology of microbial eukaryote lineages with those who specialize in the ecology and pathology of these organisms. The proposed activities will identify strategies that will accelerate species discovery and description and uncover new avenues for collaborative investigation. Invited speakers and participants will be drawn from diverse communities and career stages, and workshop activities will include a significant online component to broaden participation.
Two workshop meetings will be held in August 2019 and November 2019 to engage the diverse community of US and international protistologists. Each in-person meeting will be preceded by a series of four topic-based, interactive webinars that will be advertised widely to maximize community participation and the efficient exchange of ideas. The first in-person meeting will be held for one day directly following the joint meeting of International Society of Protistology and European Congress of Protistology. It will address community-driven resources that can streamline the integration of systematics and other fields of microbial eukaryotic research. The second in-person meeting will be held for two days at the University of Maryland. It will explore clade-based community priorities and opportunities for the sustained integration of research efforts to illuminate dark areas in the microbial eukaryotic tree of life. Outcomes of the two workshops' online and in-person components will be disseminated as a white paper within the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology and as an oral presentation to the International Society of Protistology.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
