Scaling Up: Joint Workshops on Continental-Scale Population and Community Ecology and Education

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Opportunities to address new scientific questions at continental scales have been growing enormously over the past decade or so, as new networks and knowledgebases are developed and deployed at a rapid rate. While ecosystem ecologists are used to addressing questions on such scales (productivity of biomes, global nitrogen cycles), population and community ecologists have less experience working at these spatial scales. The award provides funds to support two joint, co-occurring workshops, one for early-career population and community ecologists to develop research plans for continental scale questions on population and community ecology, and the other for undergraduate students to explore ways to apply continental and regional scale knowledgebases and tools to environmental policy issues. The proposed workshops would bring large scale data and analytical tools to the attention of young career scientists and undergraduates in population and community ecology. Practitioners at landscape and ecosystem levels are more comfortable with these tools, but population and community ecologists need to be encourages to explore questions at larger scales than plots and transects. The award will enable a broader movement in ecology towards the use of networks, global knowledgebases and distributed public data. The workshops will provide training, ideas, and collaborative network for students and early career scientists who wish to 'scale-up' in the questions addressed in community and population ecology.