Dear ECOLOG: This email is to draw your attention to the session “How can data synthesis be used to analyze seagrass resilience to climate change” (Reference ID: 0480-000039) at the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) Meeting 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 The goal of this session is to present an improved understanding of seagrass resilience to a changing climate and to discuss the challenges of integrating datasets across multiple scales. We seek to discuss how seagrass response to numerous threats can be teased apart as climate and other environmental and societal stressors change. We encourage abstracts for presentations that: 1) examine seagrass resilience to multiple threats, 2) integrate multiple types of data or models, 3) utilize data-centric approaches (e.g. ecological models, comparative analysis, etc.), or 4) present novel technologies /approaches that make data work to better understand these themes. (Longer description is below.) Cheers, Ben Dr. Benjamin Fertig 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 Estuaries are regarded as naturally stressed ecosystems with highly variable physical and chemical characteristics that, despite multiple sources of disturbances, also exhibit a high degree of ‘resilience’. Here, we take ‘resilience’ to mean the ability of an ecosystem or community to absorb change without adverse effects against a background of the system’s complexity and/or variability. Seagrasses are focused on for this session because they are highly dynamic and respond to overall habitat condition. Habitat condition can be expressed as a bistable alternation between seagrass and bare sediment dominated states. Shifts between these bistable states are linked to coastal eutrophication, high water temperatures, reduced light availability, turbidity, and ammonium or sulfide toxicity. Climate change and related phenomena (e.g. shifts in precipitation and hydrologic patterns, increasing storm frequency and/or intensity, drought, sea level rise, species migrations, estuarine and coastal acidification) can exacerbate many threats to seagrasses. Human population growth and utilization or scarcity of natural resources may also affect seagrass resilience. Resilience may thus vary by type, number, and duration of stressors and their interactions, which can result in population declines even under normally marginal conditions. Understanding this interplay may enable prediction of ecosystem level responses to key stressors and is vital to understanding the trajectory and fate of seagrass. Ecological models, comparative analysis, and synthesis studies are all powerful data-centric tools to identify broad patterns and to tease out interactive effects through hypothesis testing, baseline monitoring, historical perspectives, and forecasting. Though datasets are increasingly accessible in both quantity and volume for these approaches, the infrastructures for data sharing, management and integration often remain fractured and underutilized. Much of the data needed to answer important scientific and policy questions regarding the resilience of seagrass amidst multiple threats including climate change remain difficult to find, access, and integrate for reasons that are both technological and cultural. As a result, multiple concurrent studies conducted over several spatial and/or temporal scales are rare. Thus in practice, integrating heterogeneous data sets over multiple spatial and temporal scales is necessary even though this step is both the most difficult and most important process in making data work. This oral and poster session is designed to discuss how seagrass respond to multiple threats (not just limited to those identified above) at a variety of spatial and temporal scales, and how these threats can be teased apart as climate and other environmental and societal stressors change. We especially encourage abstracts for both oral and poster presentations from academia, government, industry, and non- governmental organizations presentations that: 1) examine seagrass resilience to multiple threats, 2) integrate multiple types of data or models (e.g. aerial or remote sensing, in situ observations and experimentation, genomics, bioinformatics, etc.), 3) utilize ecological models, comparative analysis, synthesis studies, or other data-centric approaches, or 4) present novel technologies or approaches that can help make data work to better understand these themes and yield predictive models and management tools.
