A Proposal for a Workshop on Global Environmental Change & Biological Evolution in the Ocean

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How the biology of the ocean will react to and modify the ongoing comprehensive global change-driven alterations in the marine environment is presently virtually unknown. To what extent will present day organisms and communities be able to adapt to and evolve in response to rapid regime shifts? Are the responses of currently dominant groups a good predictor of the way that future biological communities will react to anthropogenic change stressors? How can we accurately model the future effects of simultaneous multiple environmental changes, when coupled with potential organismal-, population- and ecosystem-level adaptation? How do the timescales of evolutionary change in ecologically critical functional groups of planktonic organisms compare to the timescales that are relevant for major global change processes? And finally, what implications do evolutionary biology and multi-variate regime scale shifts have for the ability of the ocean to support healthy food webs and store anthropogenic CO2? The investigators will convene an NSF-supported catalysis workshop of about 12 invited participants, to be held at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, North Carolina. This small selected group, comprised of ocean ecologists and evolutionary biologist, will address the following questions:What are the most compelling questions that are best addressed by an integrative approach combining oceanography and evolutionary biology to address biological responses to rapid environmental change in the ocean? How can studies of present-day organisms and communities be used to predict long-term adaptations and biological responses to rapid regime shifts? Can accurate models be developed to predict future effects of multiple environmental changes on organismal, population, and ecosystem-level adaptations? Assuming experimental evolution experiments are tractable, what are the best strategies (microcosms, mesocosms, and choices of organism? Participants from this initial catalysis meeting will form a steering committee that will outline plans for a larger community workshop to address these issues in a meeting to be held at USC Wrigley Institute conference facility on Catalina Island in the summer of 2009. Broader Impacts The primary broader impact of this activity is the effort to bring the evolutionary community together with the marine ecology community to plan a robust scientific approach to the problem of make long term predictions about how climate and environmental change will affect ocean organisms, populations and communities. The information will be communicated to the greater scientific community in a workshop as a follow-on activity.