3rd Workshop on Trait-Based Approaches to Marine Life

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2017

End date

12/31/2018

Budget

18,450 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

3rd workshop on trait-based approaches to ocean life How can the essential properties of community structure and ecosystem functioning be captured from a limited number of traits in organisms? In August 120 researchers from 31 nations met over four days to answer this question. Ecosystems are complex machineries and our ability to predict how changing drivers and environmental forcing influence them are limited. One way to represent and understand organisms, communities and ecosystems is to think in terms of specific traits, not species, and how the dominant traits appear in an evolutionary or ecological process from fundamental trade-offs between alternative traits. Marine ecologists and oceanographers have over the last decade turned to trait-based approaches to develop models and to understand ocean communities. The third workshop on trait-based approaches to ocean life was held in Solstrand, outside Bergen, Norway during 20-23rd of August. The earlier meetings in 2013 (Copenhagen) and 2015 (New Hampshire) set the stage for this arena as a key meeting place for researchers working in this direction. The trait-based workshops have always focused on bringing in perspectives from general ecology. The first keynote this year was Oswald Schmitz, from Yale University. His talk was on the 'evolutionary ecology of ecosystem functioning' - with examples on how behavioural plasticity in grazers in response to fear from specific predators can shift grazing pressure, plant communities and nutrient budgets in the soil. Helmut Hillebrand followed up the next day with a keynote on how trait variability and environmental heterogeneity constrain community composition and ecosystem processes. Zoe Finkels' keynote brought us to the unicellular domain, focusing on macromolecular and elemental composition of microalgae and Frede Thingstad took us even further into the microbial world, to the interactions between viruses and bacteria, to the competition between algae and bacteria and the mixture of drivers shaping structure of microbial communities. The workshop included 20 contributed talks, 80 posters and a set of break-out sessions, round-table group discussions and plenary discussions with prepared comments. Next meeting in 2019 will be organized by Ben Ward - in the UK. Pictures (see this link for more: http://bio.uib.no/modelling/news/index.php#170904) List of participants: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BztDyZzAhZ0rSjRkRWo2R1lZdTQ Detailed programme: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BztDyZzAhZ0raHdZRWtLSE9NMWM Web-page: https://traitbased.b.uib.no/ with list of abstracts, break-out groups etc: https://traitbased.b.uib.no/sample-page/