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

在过去十年左右的时间里，随着新的网络和知识库的快速发展和部署，在大陆范围内解决新的科学问题的机会大大增加。虽然生态系统生态学家习惯于在这些尺度(生物群落的生产力、全球氮循环)上解决问题，但种群和社区生态学家在这些空间尺度上的工作经验较少。该奖项提供资金支持两个共同举办的联合研讨会，一个是为职业生涯早期的人口和社区生态学家制定关于人口和社区生态的大陆尺度问题的研究计划，另一个是为本科生探索如何将大陆和区域尺度的知识库和工具应用于环境政策问题。拟议的讲习班将使人口和社区生态学方面的年轻职业科学家和本科生注意到大规模的数据和分析工具。景观和生态系统层面的从业者更习惯使用这些工具，但需要鼓励人口和社区生态学家在更大范围内探索问题，而不是地块和横断面。该奖项将使生态领域更广泛地使用网络、全球知识库和分布式公共数据。这些研讨会将为学生和早期职业科学家提供培训、想法和合作网络，这些学生和早期职业科学家希望在社区和种群生态学中解决的问题上有所扩大。

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.