2014 Ocean Global Change Biology Gordon Research Conference

Gordon Research Conferences, East Greenwich RI

Investigators

Abstract

Overview: National Science Foundation support will help establish a new Gordon Research Conference titled "Ocean Global Change Biology." Intellectual Merit: There is a growing awareness within the oceanographic and global environmental change communities that the various effects of a changing climate on oceanic properties will be both multi-faceted, and occur simultaneously. A growing body of evidence indicates that our ability to predict the biological responses to these dramatic alterations of the oceanic environment is contingent on understanding the interactive effects between many distinct ocean properties. In the last decade our research community has primarily focused on the biological effects of changes in individual ocean properties, particularly pH (ocean acidification) and temperature (sea surface warming). This new Gordon Research Conference will bring these distinct but related research threads together by adopting a holistic approach to two pressing research questions: 1) How will ocean biota respond to multiple fundamental and concurrent alterations of their environment? and 2) How will their cumulative responses affect ocean productivity, biodiversity and biogeochemistry? Broader Impacts: This new Gordon Research Conference will encompass disparate research communities, from experimentalists to modelers, who are all tackling aspects of biological responses to ocean global change. There is an urgent need to move beyond the current focus on just ocean acidification to address the full range of interactive anthropogenic global change effects on the marine biota, including warming, enhanced hypoxia and stratification, ice melting, changes in iron and nutrient availability, altered irradiance, and shifts in biological interactions such as competition and predation. The Ocean Global Change Biology conference will open new avenues of communication between the diverse research communities who are addressing all of these inter-related processes, in order to devise a range of approaches to more systematically and realistically tackle the full range of impacts of a changing ocean environment on the biological communities and living resources of the oceans.