Global Change and Ecological Complexity: A Two Workshop Proposal

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9634876 Sala The two workshops proposed by this group will foster cooperative efforts among countries of the Americas in the area of biodiversity and global change research, building upon the previous work of two programs that addressed biodiversity within a global change context - DIVERSITAS, and the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) Program on Ecosystem Functioning of Biodiversity. Because this is a very new area of ecological interest, there are no generally accepted principles. Many new hypotheses about the interaction between ecological complexity and function have been advanced, but no overall coordination exists to test them. Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE) a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) has selected ecological complexity and function as one of its areas of focus, as has the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). These workshops will jointly address the GCTE and IAI research agendas for this topic. The first workshop will develop scenarios of biodiversity change over the next fifty to one hundred years, based on currently available Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate, atmospheric composition and land-use change scenarios. These biodiversity scenarios would be analogous to the IPCC scenarios, and could form the basis for policy decisions regarding biodiversity impact and mitigation. The second workshop will develop a cooperative research program, based on an integrated set of experimental, observational, and theoretical studies to determine the strength and generality of potential effects of ecological complexity on ecosystem function. %%% This workshop provides an opportunity for scientists to develop new research in the Americas that is tightly coordinated with major global and regional research programs. The workshops will develop a research program to examine the relationships between the diversity found in an ecosystem and the functions that the eco system performs. Understanding these relationships will aid decision-makers in assessing impacts, and designing policies to mitigate the effects of global change. These workshop are being co-sponsored by the National Center for Ecosystem Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) on behalf of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). The IAI is a U.S. initiative to stimulate cooperative research on global change issues among the scientific institutions of the Americas. The National Science Foundation is the lead U.S. Government agency designated by the White House to carry out U.S. responsibilities within the IAI. ***