E-mail Announcements

Subject: ESSP Conference from Francisco Werner and Manuel Barange

ESSP (Earth System Science Partnership) Open Science Conference , 9-12 November 2006 , Beijing , China
This email is to let you know that the call for contributions process has been launched (deadline: 01 May 2006), inviting scientists/policy makers and other practitioners to submit abstracts (poster session or parallel session presentations).   The conference website is:
http://www.essp.org/ESSP2006/index.html  
The list of sessions is  
http://www.essp.org/ESSP2006/pdf/ESSP_ParallelSessionProgramme.pdf  

We would like to draw your attention to session number 39:
Marine Ecosystems: Trends, Feedbacks and Predicting Future States  
Co-convenors: Francisco Werner and Manuel Barange
Keywords: Marine ecosystems; biogeochemical states; ecosystem services; Future scenarios.
<> Over the past decades we have witnessed extraordinary natural and anthropogenically-driven changes in marine ecosystems.  Our ability to quantitatively predict future states is essential to manage our resources and guide appropriate societal responses.  Modes of climatic variability such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation have been related to shifts in ecosystem structure, species composition, distribution and biogeochemical processes.  Riverine input of fertilizer-derived nutrients has been associated with hypoxia in nearshore environments.  Increases in anthropogenic CO2 are causing a noticeable and perhaps significant reduction in the ocean's pH affecting corals and other test-forming organisms such as diatoms.  The retreat of the polar ice-caps has impacted the habitat of marine organisms as well as human populations in higher latitudes.  And, direct human activities through overfishing have caused many commercial fish stocks to be in decline.  In turn, the feedback to local human communities has resulted in changes in their economies and diets, e.g., shifting terrestrial versus marine sources of protein.  From these examples it is clear that to understand the future state of the marine environment a fully integrated view of the Earth System is required.   In this session, we seek contributions that describe through observational and modeling approaches the existing trends in the various components of the marine system and attempt to predict its future states. We encourage approaches that consider changes/effects of individual components, but are particularly interested in discussions that consider the integration across components.

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