3rd Workshop on Trait-Based Approaches to Marine Life

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/

We will organize the 3rd Workshop in Trait-based Approaches to Ocean Life in Solstrand Hotel, Bergen during 20th-23rd of August 2017. The first workshop was held in Copenhagen 2013 by the Centre for Ocean Life at DTU (Thomas Kiørboe). The second was held outside Boston in 2015, organized by Andrew Barton (Scripps) and Stephanie Dutkiewicz (MIT). Thes workshops have become cornerstones in the community for marine ecologists promoting a shift towards trait-based approaches to understanding and modelling marine ecosystems. Here, we apply for support to cover travel and accommodation for selected prominent keynote speakers, students and young researchers. Proposed keynote speakers include names like David Tilman, Mick Follows, Frede Thingstad, Zoe Finkel. The workshop is organized and supported by the Hjort Centre for marine ecosystem dynamics, and will strengthen the international position of this collaboration in the marine ecosystem community. The topic of the workshop will be trait-based approaches to understand marine ecosystem structure and functioning. In the report by Barton & al (2016), this topic was described succinctly: 'The trait-based approach to ocean life is emerging as a novel framework for understanding the complexity, structure, and dynamics of marine ecosystems, but also their broader significance. Rather than considering species individually, organisms are characterized by essential traits that capture key aspects of diversity. Trait distributions in the ocean emerge through evolution and natural selection, and are mediated by the environment, biological interactions, anthropogenic drivers, and organism behavior. Because trait variations within and across communities lead to variation in the rates of crucial ecosystem functions such as carbon export, this mechanistic approach sheds light on how variability in the environment, including climate change, impacts marine ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles, and associated feedbacks.'