Workshop to Enhance Collaboration Between US and Indonesia in Biodiversity and Conservation Research

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Beyond the inherent value of life on earth, we all depend on biodiversity for our own well-being. Diverse and healthy ecosystems are the basis of many livelihoods, they provide clean air and water, offer recreational and tourism opportunities, and are a buffer to natural disasters. Biodiversity is also the basis for our food, much of the world?s medicine and many of the products we rely on. With increasing global threats to the survival and health of the world's biota, it is crucial to the environmental and economic health of the world to document, understand, and conserve biodiversity. This workshop aims to engage and prepare US biodiversity researchers for broad international and interdisciplinary collaborations and the development of infrastructure and predictive tools that can help address pressing biodiversity research and conservation needs globally, and in the US.This workshop will take place in Indonesia, as a region that hosts a disproportionately large amount of global biodiversity. It engages US and Indonesian scientists working across disciplines of biodiversity science to discuss and strategize how to best collaborate in efforts to continue to discover, document, understand, and conserve biodiversity in a way that also considers human needs. Topics of the workshop will include building and managing successful collaborations, data sharing, applying new technologies to basic ecological and evolutionary questions as well as applied conservation issues, and training students and researchers at various career stages in valuable new technologies. The most immediate outcome of the workshop will be a publication identifying common and complementary areas of interests, synthesizing challenges and opportunities and recommending future steps in biodiversity research. The ultimate goal is to establish productive international research partnerships allowing for collaborative and comprehensive study of ecosystems and the biodiversity they encompass in a global context and facilitate international exchange and critical training of students and professionals, ultimately leading to more successful approaches for addressing global problems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.