3rd Workshop on Trait-Based Approaches to Marine Life

Vi arrangerte den tredje workshopen om 'Trekkbaserte tilnærmingar til liv i havet' den 20-23 august 2017, på Solstrand Hotell utanfor Bergen. Dette er eit møte som har gått i 2013 (København) og i 2015 (New Hampshire, USA), og som samlar forskarar og studentar som er interesserte i å forstå avvegingar hos marine organismar og korleis desse er med på å forme økosystema sin struktur og funksjon. Vi fekk kjente innleiarar som Oswald Schmitz (Yale), Helmut Hillebrandt (Univ Oldenburg), Frede Thingstad (Univ Bergen), og Zoe Finkel (Mount Allison Univ) til å gi oversikt over sentrale aktuelle spørsmål. Workshopen samla 121 forskarar med 31 ulike nasjonalitetar, og programmet var ein god blanding av innlegg, posterpresentasjon, diskusjon i smågrupper og felles diskusjon. Nettside: https://traitbased.w.uib.no/ Deltakarliste: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BztDyZzAhZ0rSjRkRWo2R1lZdTQ Bilete frå workshopen er tilgjengeleg her: http://bio.uib.no/modelling/news/index.php#170904)

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.'