In recent days there have been several announcements about different Biogeosciences sessions arranged for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting this December in San Francisco. Please be aware that this year Biogeosciences received around 50 sessions on a wide range of topics, including those relevant to ecology, biological, hydrological, biogeochemical, marine, remote sensing sciences, amongst other topics.
Before submitting your abstract, please view the information associated with each session. This can be found at: [http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm08/?content=program] under “Session Search” with the Sponsor selected as “Biogeosciences”.
Please try and avoid submitting to B01: General Contributions as the organizing committee tries to ultimately allocate these abstracts to a specific session.
The abstract submission deadline is 10 September 2008, 2359 UT (Universal Time) – with no extensions possible for whatever reason.
Thanks and we Hope to See you all in San Francisco!
Biogeosciences - AGU Fall Meeting Organizing Committee
Alistair M.S. Smith
University of Idaho
Phone: +1-208-885-1009
E-mail: Alistair@uidaho.edu
Lara Kueppers
University of California Merced
Phone: +1-209-228-4054
E-mail: lkueppers@ucmerced.edu
Anne Hartley
Florida Gulf Coast University
Phone: +1-239-590-7654
E-mail: ahartley@fgcu.edu
Dear Carbon Cycling Scientists:
We would like to call your attention to a soil carbon session sponsored by the Biogeosciences Section at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, CA, this winter, December 14-19, 2008.
Session B21: "Toward Large Scale Assessments of Soil Carbon Turnover and Vulnerability: Measures, Models, and Networks"
Description: Soil is a crucial natural resource and soil carbon is an integral component of soil structure and function. Although the global stock of soil carbon is immense, it is not static: about 120 Pg of carbon moves annually between soil and the atmosphere and vegetation. Soil carbon may thus play a singular but uncertain role in climate forcing during the coming decades, with significant net losses contributing to positive feedbacks, or significant sequestration helping to mitigate climate forcing. The loss of soil carbon or disruption of its cycling may also impair the ecosystem services it provides, with consequent negative impacts on society. Given the critical role that soil carbon plays in the climate cycle and ecosystems services globally, there is a strong need to conduct large scale, spatially explicit assessments of soil carbon turnover and vulnerability. Recent advances in measurement technologies, statistical applications, modeling approaches, and geographic information systems have made it possible to develop stand-to-landscape scale information in support of carbon sequestration decisions by both land managers and policy makers. This session invites researchers to discuss measurement, modeling, and networking of soil carbon turnover and vulnerability studies.
Abstracts due: 10 September 2008, 2359 UT (Universal Time).
Please contact one of us if you have any questions.
Mark Waldrop, United States Geological Survey
Chris Swanston, United States Forest Service
Julie Jastrow, Argonne National Labs
We would like to inform you of a planned AGU 2008 Fall Meeting session sponsored by the Biogeosciences Section:
B17: Terrestrial ecosystem respiration: identifying sources and controls
Terrestrial ecosystem respiration is the combined flux of CO2 to the atmosphere from above- and below-ground, plant and microbial sources. Flux measurements alone (e.g. from eddy covariance towers or soil chambers) cannot distinguish the contributions from these plant and microbial sources. The development of process-based models that can predict how plants and microbes respond to changing environmental conditions require that field experiments partition the sources of respiration. The purpose of this session is to assemble studies in which novel approaches have been applied (or being developed) to separate ecosystem (or soil) respiration sources and their drivers. This may include the combination of flux measurements with isotopic techniques, manipulations, gradient studies, or modeling approaches. In addition, this session welcomes contributions that can highlight important environmental, biological, or physical controls on ecosystem (or soil) respiration fluxes over diel, seasonal, interannual, or decadal time scales. Abstracts due: 10 September 2008, 2359 UT (Universal Time).
Abstract instructions | Abstract submissions
Please contact one of the conveners if you have any questions.
Mariah Carbone, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1-805-893-5501, mcarbone@icess.ucsb.edu
Rodrigo Vargas, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California, Berkeley, 1-510-642-2421, rvargas@nature.berkeley.edu
A session in the next American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting that might be of interest to some of you:
B35: Advances of Remote Sensing in Terrestrial Biodiversity Research
Sponsor: Biogeosciences
Conveners:
Andres Vina,
Michigan State University, vina@msu.edu
Mao-Ning Tuanmu,
Michigan State University, tuanmuma@msu.edu.
Description: A key problem that ecologists and evolutionary biologist have strived to understand is the abundance and distribution of the biota. In this age of drastic and rapid rates of species extinctions, such knowledge has become an essential component for management and conservation. The synoptic view provided by earth-imaging sensors constitutes an important source of information on biodiversity at broad scales. The traditional approach to using these data has involved the classification of discrete land cover types which are then related to species distributions. A critical limitation of this approach is that many important dynamics are obscured as the variance is lost within arbitrary land cover classes. In recent years, novel analytical techniques have been developed that more fully exploit the spatial, spectral and temporal information content of remotely sensed imagery in order to quantify a broader range of ecosystem services, including biodiversity. This session features advances in the synoptic assessment of biodiversity at different spatial and temporal scales, using sensors carried on aerial and satellite platforms. The session will provide the initial steps towards a multi-disciplinary collaboration for establishing a synthesis on the synoptic assessment and management of biodiversity. We request presentations on applications of remote sensing techniques to biodiversity research, including the development of methodologies for assessment, monitoring, and modeling, as well as their implications for management and conservation.
We are organizing a session at the fall meeting (15-19 December 2008) of the American Geophysical Union (http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm08/) entitled:
B23: Environmental and Ecological Consequences of Deploying Second Generation Biofuels on the Landscape.
We encourage you to submit an abstract to this session (Online Submission Deadline - 10 September 2008). We are particularly interested in scientific results stemming from empirical, theoretical or synthesis studies examining the ecological or environmental consequences of converting current land uses to potential biofuel feedstocks. With your participation, this should be an exciting and highly visible session.
We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco.
Best wishes,
Evan DeLucia, co-organizer (delucia@uiuc.edu)
Bill Parton, co-organizer (billp@nrel.colostate.edu)
“The accelerating combustion of fossil fuels is driving the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; as this “greenhouse” gas accumulates it forces a rapid and potentially dangerous warming of the planet. Biofuels have the potential to offset the accumulation of carbon dioxide and thus slow the rate of global warming. The largest contiguous biome in continental North America is the agricultural region where corn and soybean are grown in rotation. Allocating a portion of this region to the production of “second generation” biofuels, such as perennial grasses, has the potential to reduce the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and may mitigate some of the negative impacts of modern agriculture, including the loss of soil carbon and nitrogen contamination of ground water. This session will examine recent understanding of the effects of biofuel feedstocks on the biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nitrogen and water, and will incorporate societal and economic implications through a discussion of life-cycle analysis applied to biofuel feedstocks.”
I'd like to call your attention to an ecohydrology session at the 2008 AGU Fall Meeting: H24: Hydrologic Controls on Ecosystem Function. A full session description can be found below. If this topic is in your field, I would like to strongly encourage you to submit an abstract to the session.
Session H24: Hydrologic Controls on Ecosystem Function
The feedbacks between surface hydrology and ecosystem function are of critical importance for both the water and nutrient cycles, yet the interactions among these concurrent processes remain poorly understood. Episodic hydrologic events such as moisture pulses, or conversely, periods of water stress, make many ecosystems particularly sensitive to hydrological change, as seasonal and inter-annual variability of plant and ecosystem function can be especially dependent on the magnitude and timing of moisture inputs. This session invites papers from the hydrological, physiological, and biogeochemical communities to bridge traditional scientific disciplines in order to further our holistic understanding of how moisture inputs propagate into eco(hydro)systems. Topics of interest include investigations of the role that topography, complex terrain and moisture inputs (e.g., rainy season, snowmelt, intermittent water table) play in the interaction between surface hydrology and the exchange of mass, energy and momentum across the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Studies employing field-based data collection and innovative methods of analysis and modeling, and papers that consider the complications of working across a range of spatial and temporal scales are encouraged. We seek contributions that take an integrative approach to exploring coupled ecological-hydrological processes from hillslope to basin scales. This session is intended to stimulate discussion, comparison, and context of hydrologic controls on ecosystem function across moisture-controlled ecosystems.
Holly Barnard, Oregon State University
I'd like to bring your attention to the session "Environmental Consequences of the Changing Global Food System" being held at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, December 15 -19th, 2008. Abstracts must be submitted by Sept 10th at http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm08/
Union 14: Environmental Consequences of the Changing Global Food System
Producing agricultural products, whether for food, animal feed or biofuels, is a primary driver of global environmental change. The pressure on terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems worldwide is increasing due to rises in the global population, the demand for diets rich in meat and fish protein, and the demand for biofuels. At the same time, globalization and the commodity trade are creating linkages between demand, land use change and environmental degradation in different, distant regions of the planet. This session will examine recent changes in the production of food, feed and fuel around the planet, the social, cultural and economic forces driving those changes, and the global implications for ecosystems, biodiversity, food security, water resources and the climate.
Emphasis will be places on the following issues: i) appropriation of planetary resources (land, water, estuaries, fisheries) for food, feed and biofuel production; ii) environmental "teleconnections" caused by globalization and the international food trade; iii) the consequences of changes in food demand and diet on nutrient cycling, water resources, biodiversity, and air quality; iv) the effect of global change on agricultural production. Conveners: Simon Donner, Jonathan Foley, Navin Ramankutty, Mutlu Ozdogan
More news: See the biogeosciences.org pages for 'in the news' and 'announcements'.
Older news items:
Linking Ecological Biology and Geoscience - Report to the National Science Foundation, April 4, 2002.
"Biogeosciences at the Threshold" - recommendations for future directions for the new section from workshop held March 21-22, 2001.
AGU Adds Biogeosciences Section - press release covering the addition of the new section, June 8, 2000.
