BBCS Faculty Receive Collaborative NSF BioFI Award!

Brian Enquist, Kacey Ernst, and Dave Breshears have recently been awarded a collaborative NSF research grant, entitled "BoCP-Implementation: BioFI- Biodiversity Forecasting Initiative to Understand Population, Community and Ecosystem Function Under Global Change." Supported research will focus on developing novel theory that links functional ecology, demography, and biogeography to scale up to community and ecosystem dynamics. 

The loss of biodiversity and ecosystem function is one of the grand environmental challenges facing humankind. The science required to understand and mitigate these challenges will require unprecedented access to data that cross space, time and biological subdisciplines. We develop novel theory that links functional ecology, demography, and biogeography to scale up to community and ecosystem dynamics. This project brings together ecologists, environmental engineers, data scientists, and conservation stakeholders to determine optimal ways to integrate these data sources to forecast for plants globally by addressing changes in (1) ecosystem function (2) community structure, and (3) species' abundance and geographic distribution. This three-pronged approach is designed to span a range of biological subdisciplines to understand the spectrum of possible futures consistent with our current knowledge while integrating across scales of biological organization. We use these forecasts along with input from conservation stakeholders to assess how differing conservation decisions can minimize the impacts of global change responses. An ultimate goal is to automate a pipeline to ingest new incoming data, update forecasts, and serve these to end-users to enable a forecasting workflow to provide best-available predictions at any given time to inform conservation decisions.

Stay tuned for more information about ways to get involved, or contact one of our BBCS award recipients.