Dear ECOLOG: This email is to draw your attention to the upcoming CERF session “Estuarine and Coastal Data-Centric Synthesis Studies: Case studies and Pathways for Moving Forward” (Reference ID: 0480-000024) at this fall’s CERF Conference 8-12 November 2015 in Portland, OR. If interested, please consider submitting an abstract to this session. CERF’s deadline for abstract submissions is May 1.
http://www.erf.org/call-for-abstracts Data-centric synthesis approaches are valuable for 1) hypothesis testing, 2) baseline monitoring, 3) historical perspectives, and 4) forecasting. Integrating heterogeneous data sets is difficult and crucial to make data work for synthesis. Yet data sharing, management and integration remain underutilized. We encourage talks and posters utilizing approaches above to highlight strategies for achieving syntheses across ecosystem components, time scales, and/or spatial scales. Presentations on best practices, available resources, and technologies or protocols are encouraged. We aim to move the field forward towards community standards, integrating big and small data and towards digitization of inaccessible data. (Longer description is below.) Cheers, Ben Visiting Scientist (working remotely) Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey Institute of Marine & Coastal Sciences Phone: 301.785.7614 Email: [email protected] Skype: ben.fertig Understanding estuarine and coastal environments in the context of multiple stressors that interact in complex ways requires a holistic interdisciplinary perspective. Data-centric synthesis approaches have been demonstrated to be of value for 1) hypothesis testing, 2) baseline monitoring, 3) historical perspectives, and 4) forecasting, according to the results of a workshop held at the CERF 2013 conference in San Diego. Synthesis has recently been defined as “the inferential process whereby new models are developed from analysis of multiple data sets to explain observed patterns across a range of time and space scales”. There are many types of synthesis studies, including 1) Ecological - considering linkages across ecosystem components or ecosystem organization (e.g. community, population, genetic), 2) Spatial - considering linkages at multiple spatial scales, and requires consideration of scalar processes, co-location of measurements of comparably-scaled monitoring indicators, and appropriate sampling /statistical design for spatially dependent data, - this includes comparative analyses of multiple ecosystems, 3) Temporal - considers linkages across various temporal scales and considered appropriate frequency of measurements for each variable, perhaps nested at a common scale for aggregation. Integrating heterogeneous data sets over large spatial and temporal scales is both the most difficult and the most important process in making data work for a synthesis study. Though datasets are becoming accessible for synthesis in increasing quantity and volume, the infrastructures for data sharing, management and integration often remain fractured and thus underutilized. Much of the data needed to answer important scientific and policy questions remain difficult to find, access, and integrate for reasons that are both technological and cultural. The workshop mentioned above identified over a dozen action items that can serve synthesis science within the estuarine and coastal research community. Three examples are 1) the development of community standards, 2) accommodating and integrating big data (e.g. sensor feeds) with small data (e.g. single investigator data sets), and 3) pathways for digitization of ‘dark data’ (inaccessible data, e.g. in a filing cabinet with little to no curation, archival or data which may be destroyed when the researcher leaves science). This combined oral and poster session is designed to follow up on the CERF 2013 workshop. We especially encourage presentations that utilize any of the approaches or types of synthesis studies mentioned, that highlight how data-centric synthesis has been demonstrated to be of value, and/or that move the field forwards towards the three example action items. We encourage presentations from academia, government, industry and non-governmental organizations focusing on best practices, available resources, results from estuarine and coastal data-centric research/synthesis projects and new technologies or protocols that can aid estuarine and coastal data-centric research/synthesis. Cheers, Ben
