14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) have awarded 14 research teams with grants for studying macrosystems biology. This field of science deals with investigating biological systems at a large scale, ranging from regional to continental.
This will help biologists gain a better understanding of how local ecosystems and food webs interact in the grand scheme of things. Thus far, few studies have been conducted at such a large scale, even if scientists knew the potential scientific returns.
Admittedly, the costs of conducting such investigations are fairly high, which is why the NSF had to step in and finance the scientific endeavors. The new studies will help experts understand and predict the effects of climate and land-use change on organisms and ecosystems at these large scales.
The rate at which natural and human-induced changes are affecting the environment is rising steadily, and researchers admit they are overwhelmed by the rate of change. Studies taking decades to complete are no longer relevant by the time they are finished.
Some of the factors scientists are interested in include how organisms and ecosystems react to stressors from the environment, how various inter-species relationships change, and also how the availability of critically-important freshwater varies between regions and continents.
“The biosphere has changed more in the past 50 years than during any time in human history,” explains the program director of the NSF Division of Environmental Biology, researcher Henry Gholz.
“Many of the changes are driven by human activities such as climate and land-use change, and the introduction of invasive species. Collectively, they affect living systems by altering the fundamental relationships between life and the non-living environment that sustains it,” he goes on to say.
Some of the conclusions these studies will return will most likely challenge current understandings of how the biosphere works. However, the teams that got the new awards argue that their colleagues in the international scientific community should not shy away from new data.
“A major challenge in making predictions about the future of life on Earth is that organism and ecosystem responses may be driven by processes operating across geographic scales,” NSF official Elizabeth Blood says.
“As the scale of study increases to regions and continents, we need a better understanding of these complex dynamics and thresholds,” adds Blood, a program director in the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences Emerging Frontiers Division.