Workshop: The Past, Present, and Future of NSF's Macrosystems Biology Program, August 5-6, 2015, Arlington, Virginia

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This award will partially cover participant support for the 2015 MacroSystem Biology (MSB) principal investigator meeting on August 5-6 at NSF headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. This is the last MSB meeting under the current program solicitation. Goals of the meeting include highlighting program successes and discussing future directions for MSB science. Support will be allocated to about 10 participants on a case need basis. Inclusion of these participants will facilitate achieving meeting goals by helping to ensure full participation of MSB projects and enabling full assessment the progress of MSB science over the course of the program. Large-scale atmosphere-biosphere feedbacks and interactions are a large source of uncertainty in predicting the impact of future climate change. The MSB program has served as a catalyst to understand this issue by encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers in computer science, geography, climatology, biology and ecology. The MSB program is currently on hiatus to reassess program priorities and restructure future iterations. This MSB meeting will be an integral part of this process, as it will highlight the successes and discuss logistical challenges for MSB research. Participant support requested in this proposal is especially important for allowing greater participation and reflection among the diverse group of MSB projects.Understanding atmosphere-biosphere interactions and feedbacks under a changing climate is an urgent need facing society. However, such large scale understanding requires an interdisciplinary approach because of the complexity of scaling up observations and model predictions in time and space. The MSB program was formed in order to address this need and to provide a venue to support inter-disciplinary collaborations. At this meeting, participants will reflect upon the successes of and challenges facing MSB type research in the future through a series of oral and poster presentations and breakout sessions.