Building Global Ecological Understanding Workshop

As a member of the organizing committee, Hank Loescher of the National Ecological Observatory Network will leading several sessions at the community-driven Building Global Ecological Understanding (BGEU) Workshop in Delaware between June 3-5. 

Overarching workshop goals

• What are the current ecological theories and grand challenge questions that span continents in order to provide a broader ecological understanding and prognostic capability to inform science and society; 
• How can observatories/networks be used to address among continent-to-global grand challenges; 
• What attributes can be integrated among observatories/networks to foster a broader understanding; and 
• Which are the near term strategic targets that should be followed by the scientific community.

As an output, the workshop will lead to at least one white paper report for the National Science Foundation and one peer-reviewed contribution from the main outcomes of the workshop. Follow up activities and final workshop contributions/outputs will be discussed and outlined during Day 3.

Workshop structure overview

• Day 1: Focus on identifying scientific grand challenges and frontier sciences to address ecological questions and ecological understanding at the continental-to- global scale.  Meant to be challenging and provocative short-talks and break-out open discussions.
• Day 2: Focus on how best implement the findings/key challenges/opportunities from the first day with existing Observatory/Network structures, either formally or informally
• Day 3: Wrap-up, craft writing tasks and develop ongoing synthetic activities (half-day)