Estuarine Research Federation Initiative in Biocomplexity
Facilitation of Research on Estuarine Responses to Climate Change and Variability
Through this project, the Estuarine Research Federation (ERF), the premier U.S. scientific society for research on estuaries, will advance the scientific concepts and approaches for investigations of the effects of climate change and variability on coastal and estuarine ecosystems.
Coastal and estuarine systems are very sensitive to climate change and variability through changes in temperature, sea level, river flow, and coastal circulation. Although there is a general understanding of the physical effects of such changes, the consequences to the biodiversity and functioning of these ecosystems—or their biocomplexity—are poorly understood.
Through a community town meeting at its Biennial Conference on Wednesday, November 7, 2001, and a focused workshop on April 7-10, 2002, ERF will synthesize the state of this knowledge and identify the most important research needs. The workshop, held at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, will involve involving estuarine, social and climate scientists (Workshop Agenda, Adobe Acrobat Reader required). The objective is to greatly accelerate the involvement of the estuarine science community in addressing these complex and critically important questions.
I prepared a background overview for the workshop entitled:
Summary of Climate Change Assessments: Implications for Estuarine Biocomplexity (Adobe Acrobat Reader required)
The National Science Foundation is supporting this ERF initiative under its Biocomplexity in the Environment program. I am serving, along with Anne Giblin of the Marine Biological Laboratory, as co-principal investigators. Our proposal to the NSF can be viewed or downloaded (Adobe Acrobat Reader required).