Overview: National Science Foundation support will help establish a new Gordon Research Conference titled "Ocean Global Change Biology."
Intellectual Merit: There is a growing awareness within the oceanographic and global environmental change communities that the various effects of a changing climate on oceanic properties will be both multi-faceted, and occur simultaneously. A growing body of evidence indicates that our ability to predict the biological responses to these dramatic alterations of the oceanic environment is contingent on understanding the interactive effects between many distinct ocean properties. In the last decade our research community has primarily focused on the biological effects of changes in individual ocean properties, particularly pH (ocean acidification) and temperature (sea surface warming). This new Gordon Research Conference will bring these distinct but related research threads together by adopting a holistic approach to two pressing research questions: 1) How will ocean biota respond to multiple fundamental and concurrent alterations of their environment? and 2) How will their cumulative responses affect ocean productivity, biodiversity and biogeochemistry?
Broader Impacts: This new Gordon Research Conference will encompass disparate research communities, from experimentalists to modelers, who are all tackling aspects of biological responses to ocean global change. There is an urgent need to move beyond the current focus on just ocean acidification to address the full range of interactive anthropogenic global change effects on the marine biota, including warming, enhanced hypoxia and stratification, ice melting, changes in iron and nutrient availability, altered irradiance, and shifts in biological interactions such as competition and predation.
The Ocean Global Change Biology conference will open new avenues of communication between the diverse research communities who are addressing all of these inter-related processes, in order to devise a range of approaches to more systematically and realistically tackle the full range of impacts of a changing ocean environment on the biological communities and living resources of the oceans.
The Gordon Research Conference on OCEAN GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY was held at Waterville Valley Resort, Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, July 6-11th, 2014. The Conference was well-attended with 163 participants (attendees list attached). The attendees represented the spectrum of endeavor in this field coming from academia, industry, and government laboratories, both U.S. and foreign scientists, senior researchers, young investigators, and students. Of the 163 attendees, 93 voluntarily responded to a general inquiry regarding ethnicity which appears on our registration forms. Of the 93 respondents, 8% were Minorities – 3% Hispanic, 5% Asian and 0% African American. Approximately 54% of the participants at the 2014 meeting were women. In designing the formal speakers program, emphasis was placed on current unpublished research and discussion of the future target areas in this field. There was a conscious effort to stimulate lively discussion about the key issues in the field today. Time for formal presentations was limited in the interest of group discussions. In order that more scientists could communicate their most recent results, poster presentation time was scheduled. Attached is a copy of the formal schedule and speaker program and the poster program. In addition to these formal interactions, "free time" was scheduled to allow informal discussions. Such discussions are fostering new collaborations and joint efforts in the field.
