IOS-0840138 Exploring Science Needs for Predicting Organismal Responses to Rapid Directional Environmental Change.
A workshop will be convened in the Fall of 2008 to identify the most pressing problems and challenges in predicting the response of organisms, and the communities and ecosystems to which they belong, to rapid environmental change. Anthropogenically driven climate and environmental change is currently occurring so rapidly that for most higher organisms new adaptive mutations are powerless to respond on a relevant time scale leaving these organisms reliant on existing genetic diversity to support adaptation. Participants have been selected to represent expertise on different organism types across multiple levels of biological organization from molecular to ecosystem within an overarching framework of computational simulations and predictive modeling. The central goals of the workshop are to increase the awareness of research needs related to rapid climate and environmental change, identify critical collaborative research needs, identify synergistic links, and develop a roadmap for research that may assist federal funding agencies in setting their research priorities in the context of the rapidly changing global environment. This workshop will provide an opportunity for a diverse group of participants to help initiate and prioritize new research that would advance understanding of the responses of integrative organismal systems to rapid directional environmental change. The impact of the workshop is found in its three primary objectives: 1. Identify critical research needs for predicting organismal responses to rapid environmental change. 2. Identify and prioritize appropriate target organismal systems, experimental approaches and methods, and integrative activities with greatest promise for efficient progress. 3. Identify critical model inputs and model enhancements that will be required to predict how organismal responses will cause changes at the ecosystem and planet scale. The Broader Impacts of the workshop, beyond the focus on an environmental issue and impact on biological systems; this focus has relevance to societal issues, are that scientists from diverse backgrounds and with a broad range of expertise will participate and interact.
