Proposal for a Workshop to Make NEON - A Transformational Ecological Resch Program that Robustly Embraces the Human Dimension to be held in Fall 2005, at Harvard U. Harvard Forest

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

A workshop will be held to bring together key scientists working at the cutting edge of human-environment studies to explore the approaches, designs, infrastructure, and research opportunities for explicitly incorporating coupled human-environment systems into dynamical ecological forecasting from national observatory networks such as the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). The workshop will provide an unprecedented opportunity for social scientists and ecologists to discuss the collaborative infrastructure needed to explore the interactions among policy, human activity, and environmental conditions and processes that operate at regional to continental scale. The workshop participants will develop a coupled human-environment system framework to inform the NEON design that explores the human experiment, identifies relevent social science research, identifies social science infrastructure needs, provides an effective science-policy-land management interface, and identifies information and models to support forecasting of NEON science. The anticipated intellectual impact will come from discussions of the opportunities to collaboratively and robustly address ecological forecasting challenges, particularly as it relates to including the human system as an integral part of NEON design and implementation. The workshop will have broad impacts by identifying key interests and linkages of social scientists and agencies that can leverage the emergent frontiers, research opportunities, and unique infrastructure capacity that will arise from the environmental research observing systems and networks. In addition, the resulting reports will provide guidance on the planning, funding, implementation, coordination, and ultimate use of observing systems by ecologists, sociologists, and agencies to develop an ecological forecasting capacity.