For those attending the upcoming American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Feb 13-18, 2011, we would like to bring to your attention a special session entitled: Biodiversity in a Changing World: Insights from Paleoecological Data (Special session 13). We feel that this is an exciting new area of research in the aquatic sciences and in this session, we would like to explore possible synergies and collaborations. Our goal is to bring together aquatic scientists from paleoecology and community ecology backgrounds to forge new research pathways for understanding biodiversity patterns in aquatic ecosystems. The description of our session can be found at the end of this posting.
If your research interests are in Biodiversity science and you work on contemporary systems that may have a paleolimnological analog (e.g. phytoplankton, zooplankton, macroinvertebrates), we would especially like to hear from you. To access the abstract submission site please go to: http://www.aslo.org/meetings/sanjuan2011/start_process.html. The deadline for both abstract submission and early registration is 11 October 2010. S13: Biodiversity in a Changing World: Insights from Paleoecological Data Internationally, scientists and policy makers have recognized that global biodiversity is declining as consequence of human-induced environmental changes and that this loss is occurring at a rate of up to 1000x faster than in the past. Clearly, paleoecological data have played an important role in providing a comparative framework for interpreting recent biodiversity changes. However, paleolimnological and paleoceanographic data can also be instrumental in identifying drivers of biodiversity over both large spatial and temporal scales. The study of aquatic biodiversity using data derived from sediment records has numerous advantages and thus has the potential to make great advancements in biodiversity science. For example, the wide range of organisms that are preserved in sediment records provide scientists with a spectrum of model organisms that differ in dispersal capabilities, generation times, and sensitivities to environmental variables. In addition, paleoecological studies commonly quantify the optima and tolerances of organisms to a suite of environmental variables, and as a result, these data lend themselves strongly to functional diversity approaches; an emerging area in biodiversity research and understanding. In this session, we plan to bring together aquatic scientists from paleoecology and community ecology backgrounds to forge new research pathways for understanding biodiversity patterns in aquatic ecosystems. If you have questions about whether your work might be suitable, please contact one of the co- convenors by email: Irene Gregory-Eaves ([email protected]) or Beatrix Beisner ([email protected]).
