Meeting: Physiological Responses to Multiple Stressors in a Changing Climate, A symposium for the 2013 SICB annual meeting in San Francisco, CA

San Francisco State University, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Abstract

Habitats around the globe are increasingly impacted by anthropogenic activities that alter the climate, introduce species, and increase pollution. Understanding the impacts of global change on the distribution and abundance of organisms in the context of their habitats is at the forefront of integrative organismal biology. Biologists working to understand how the distribution of organisms will be impacted by biotic and abiotic habitat changes have long used carefully controlled laboratory experiments that manipulate a single environmental variable (e.g., habitat temperature) to determine some aspect of organismal performance (e.g., temperature tolerance). Those performance parameters are subsequently used to infer ecological responses. The majority of studies done by physiologists examine one environmental variable at a time, yet in nature organisms are simultaneously exposed to multiple types of environmental variables, including habitat shifts that may affect different physiological systems within an organism. Whether those multiple shifts in environmental variables have an additive, an antagonistic, or a non-linear synergistic effect on performance is a critical issue to understand in order to properly link ecological responses to simultaneous shifts in multiple habitat characteristics. This grant will fund a symposium at the 2013 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in San Francisco that will focus on physiological studies where multiple environmental variables are simultaneously examined to test the additive-antagonistic-synergistic response possibilities. By bringing together leading researchers, the PIs hope to establish the necessary next steps to increase our ability to predict how organisms respond to a multivariate changing environment. It is expected that this symposium will establish novel collaborations among researchers actively investigating physiological responses to a multivariate environment, and broaden the number of researchers conducting such studies. Speakers in the symposium are engaged in research on insects, reptiles, freshwater and marine fish, and marine invertebrates, and study environmental variables including temperature, oxygen, acidification, salinity, desiccation, altitude, latitude, pollution, disease, and physical forcing (flow/turbulence). Recruitment of underrepresented minority participants will be emphasized by the PIs to all of the symposium participants. Merit-based travel awards will be provided to junior colleagues to support their participation in a contributed paper session linked to the symposium. Presentation manuscripts will be published in the SICB journal Integrative and Comparative Biology (http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/).