Meeting: Beyond the Mean: Biological Impacts of Changes in Temperature Variation, SICB, Portland, Oregon, January 2016

University Of Montana, Missoula MT

Investigators

Abstract

Although much research has documented how changes in average environmental temperatures affect organisms, much less work has evaluated how changes in temperature variation (day to day or season to season), and in the frequency and impacts of extreme weather events, affect organisms. Nevertheless, early studies and theoretical work indicate that the impacts of changing patterns of temperature variation can be enormous. Biologists are on the cusp of an explosion of work in this area, and the symposium that this grant supports (at the Portland 2016 meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology) will drive these ideas forward by bringing together established and early-career biologists for a wide-ranging discussion of theory and data. The results of this symposium will be published in the journal of Integrative and Comparative Biology. The symposium will support a diversity of scientists along with students and researchers at all levels. The grant will support a diversity of international and US scientists working across a variety of levels (altogether 4 women, 4 postdocs, 5 international, and 2 from underrepresented groups). This project will also function as an experiment to explore a new model of running a symposium and of generating rapidly-published, high-impact papers. Each participant will be asked ahead of time to address, in their talk, one or more of four outstanding questions in the field. Then, at the symposium, participants will give oral presentations to the group and will subsequently work in two intensive workshops aimed at generating broadly focused, high-impact papers reflecting the consensus (or lack thereof) about the current state of the field and a description of productive next steps. Discussions are underway with the publication journal (Integrative and Comparative Biology) to streamline the publication process so that the papers appear online and in print as soon as possible. During the meeting, participation will be broadened in two ways. First, audience participation will be encouraged both by scheduling long question & answer periods (10 minutes) after each talk and by gathering questions and comments from symposium and audience participants via social media during talks to be used in the Q&A and in the workshops to frame discussions. Second, there will be a companion, related poster session by students and researchers at all levels. These scientists will be encouraged to participate in the workshops as well, and potentially to co-author symposium papers.