Marine Ecosystem Engineers in a Changing World: Establishing Links Across Systems - A Symposium of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, Seattle, WA, January 2010

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Ecosystem engineers are organisms that produce unique habitats by creating physical structure or by altering the flow of materials, such as water, around them. Ecosystem engineers are particularly diverse and important in marine environments, and include organisms such as corals, oysters, tube-building and burrowing worms, seagrasses, mangroves, and macroalgae. These organisms modify their own external conditions, and create habitats for other organisms. Some invasive marine species are adept ecosystem engineers and readily adapt to their new environments by virtue of their engineering capabilities. Other native species, long recognized as ecosystem engineers, are declining despite their engineering capacities, apparently lacking the resilience to cope with stresses imposed by changing environments. Comparisons across systems are needed to fully understand the physiological/architectural characteristics and organism-environment interactions that shape ecosystem engineering. To this end, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology has organized a symposium entitled "Marine Ecosystem Engineers in a Changing World: Establishing Links Across Systems" for its annual meeting in Seattle, Washington in January 2010. The organizers' goals are to: (i) establish commonalities in the physiological, chemical, and physical processes that allow organisms to become ecosystem engineers, (ii) develop a consensus about how human activities and climate change influence ecosystem engineers, and (iii) begin a discussion about how to use this understanding to inform conservation biologists and resource managers about threatened or invasive ecosystem engineers. To our knowledge, no other symposium has ever addressed this range of issues comparatively across systems. Students-in-training from undergraduates through advanced Ph.D. candidates will be well-represented at the symposium.