Meeting: Evolutionary Impacts of Seasonality; a Symposium for the Annual Meeting of SICB, New Orleans, LA, Jan 4-8 2017

Society For Integrative And Comparative Biology, Herndon VA

Investigators

Abstract

Non Technical: Changing of the seasons drives biological rhythms across the globe, from annual breeding seasons, to crop planting and harvest, to economics. Thus, disruptions to seasonal biology will have serious impacts on human health and well-being. Understanding how organisms respond to seasonality is a major goal of research spanning physiology, ecology, and behavior. We propose a symposium bringing together perspectives from each of these fields, with a particular focus on evolutionary responses to past and future changes in seasonality. Integrative research spanning sub disciplines has proven to deliver transformative discoveries in a way that narrowly focused research cannot. The proposed symposium will facilitate such integrative research by bringing together researchers from across fields, working on organisms ranging from plants to mammals, to synthesize the current state of knowledge on biological seasonality and to identify important gaps in knowledge and opportunities for cross-pollination across fields. Technical: The symposium will be hosted at the January 2017 annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in New Orleans, USA, and will produce manuscripts for an issue of the SICB journal Integrative and Comparative Biology (ICB). Prior to the conference, the organizers will remotely coordinate the drafting of a synthetic review paper by a group of participants. During the meeting, participants will present their own research and continue drafting the synthesis paper during a hosted workshop. This workshop will also serve to facilitate new, cross-disciplinary research. Finally, participants will publish their individual research alongside the review paper in a special issue of ICB.