Monday, August 2, 2010: 8:00 PM-10:00 PM
301-302, David L Lawrence Convention Center
SS 10 - Actuating Large-Scale, Integrated, Global-Change Research beyond Concept to Implementation: Lessons from the Terrestrial Wetland Global Change Research Network
The complexities of environmental change and impacts on ecosystem services require that we consider climate change within a broad context of multiple stressors interacting on landscapes. Effective assessments of these collective impacts of global change call for integrated, standardized approaches designed to describe relationships between drivers and effects of change across meaningful spatiotemporal scales. These assessments are not simple or straightforward. They command multidisciplinary research collaborations, new technologies, diverse and committed partnerships, leadership, and leveraged resources uncommon in the ecological sciences. However, climate change adds extra urgency to the need for new scientific approaches that provide information society can use to understand tradeoffs between human activities and critical ecosystem services. The Terrestrial Wetland Global Change Research Network (TWGCRN) is such an approach. We are a growing network of U.S. and Canadian organizations, scientists, and research sites designed to address 1) the long-term impacts of climate/global change on ecosystem services provided by wetland-upland landscape matrices and 2) options that resource managers and other stakeholders have to mitigate negative impacts. Collaborators recognize the critical need for such research, are leveraging resources to accomplish it despite inherent challenges, and are using multidisciplinary tools and cutting-edge technologies to describe landscape responses to climate/global change at multiple scales across a vital portion of North America. We will present a TWGCRN overview and moderate an open discussion regarding strategies for conducting large-scale climate/global-change research in light of the TWGCRN model. Our goal for this session is to facilitate the development of integrated, informative, large-scale global-change research.
Organizer:	Walt Sadinski, United States Geological Survey
Co-organizers:	Alisa Gallant, United States Geological Survey Bruce Pauli, Environment Canada Dean Thompson, Canadian Forest Service Jeff Houlahan, University of New Brunswick, St. John Brian Brisco, Canada Centre for Remote Sensing Stuart Gage, Michigan State University Perry Jones, U.S. Geological Survey Don Rosenberry, U.S. Geological Survey

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See more of The 95th ESA Annual Meeting (August 1 -- 6, 2010)