This award supports the MYRES III meeting of Young Researchers in Earth Sciences: Dynamic Interactions of Life and its Landscape. The goal of this four-day workshop will be to identify the spatial and temporal scales over which various physical, chemical, and biological processes act. The first three days? discussion will focus on increasing spatial scales, from the grain-scale on day 1 to continental and global dynamics on day 3, and will cover topics such as soil formation/transport, co-evolution of life and landforms, and feedbacks between biology and climate. The fourth day will use the formalisms developed in the previous days to address human beings as geologic agents, including human/landscape and human/climate interactions. The unifying theme throughout is the interaction between life and its landscape.
Greater and more interdisciplinary understanding of the feedbacks between physical and biological processes on Earth?s surface is pressing as an increasingly urbanized world responds to global change. By bringing together an international group of early career researchers, MYRES III will provide a forum to freely discuss emerging ideas to address these challenges. The conference organizing committee, composed primarily of young researchers from disparate disciplines who are already collaborating on the questions MYRES III will address, is well prepared to provide effective facilitation of conference discussions. Guidance and material support will be provided in part by both the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics, an NSF Science and Technology Center, and the University of Illinois Hydrologic Synthesis Initiative, thus ensuring that ideas and results generated during MYRES III continue to inform and be informed by the larger community.
Broader impacts. Interdisciplinary approaches will soon be the norm for researchers across surface process science, and yet there are few opportunities for young researchers to receive truly interdisciplinary training. Specifically soliciting attendance by researchers from around the globe, MYRES III will facilitate the formation of a world-wide network of young scientists who together can tackle issues at the interface of physical and biological sciences. The workshop will be held in New Orleans to highlight the delicate and multifaceted nature of human-climate-landscape interactions: day 1 of the post-conference fieldtrip will include a visit to those sites most affected by Hurricane Katrina and a discussion of remediation efforts. Opportunities will be available to members of the broader New Orleans community to interact with conference attendees and to learn from the physical models and experiments included in the Earthscapes Exposition. Finally, a major goal of the workshop will be to generate results in one discipline that can be understood and applied in another, hence making even discipline-specific work available and relevant to a wider audience.
The workshop is jointly supported by three programs within the NSF: Geomorphology and Land-Use Dynamics, Hydrological Sciences, and the Ecosystem Science Cluster.
