The Role of Evolutionary, Population and Community Responsesin Analysis of Global Environmental Change: A Workshop Proposal; Friday Harbor, Washington; September 1991

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Ecological discussions of environmental change have emphasized either physiological responses of individual organisms or ecosystem.level responses of entire trophic levels and functional groups. Largely missing from these discussions has been significant input from the domain of classical population, evolutionary, and community ecology. Yet these fields should be playing a key role in discussions of the ecological consequences of environmental change. Population and community interactions serve as links by which the physiological consequences of environmental change are integrated into ecosystem.level responses. Moreover, evolutionary and community ecology have recently developed a rich empirical and theoretical foundation that has the promise of catalyzing..perhaps even directly offering..predictions about long.term consequences of massive climatic and land.use shifts. This workshop is being held to address the potential contributions of evolutionary, physiological, population, and community ecology to issues of environmental change. Participants will evaluate existing contributions as well as suggest directions for new research. In addition, the workshop will attempt to link its findings to the physiological and ecosystem.level contributions that have emerged from previous ecological syntheses. To share the evaluations with a large audience, the organizers will rapidly produce an edited book (to be published by a commercial publisher) that details the existing insights of evolutionary and community ecology pertinent to environmental change, and that highlights and sets out directions for future research. In addition, a brief summary of the report will be published in the Ecological Society of America's new publication, >Ecological Applications>, which will thus reach a wide readership free of charge. Finally, the participants will also prepare a concise summary of the workshop geared to a general nontechnical audience; this "layperson's" report could be distributed among government officials by NSF.