Workshop on Productivity, Diversity and Ecosystem Functioning
In May 2009, twenty international scientist came together in the
beautiful setting of the University of Washintons Field station in
Friday Harbor (San Juan Island) to discuss the relationship between
productivity, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the abyss.
To adress this matter,
31 data
sets from the abyss were assembled before the workshop started. They include
megafaunal, macrofaunal and meiofaunal data from the North Atlantic, South
Atlantic, Southern Ocean, North Pacific, Indian Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and
Mediterranean. In most data sets, fauna
were identified to the species level, with counts provided for each sample.
While the first day of the workshop was dedicated to presentations of
the participants, the following two days were filled with discussions
about the following topics:
- General productivity-diversity patterns in ecolog,
drivers/mechanisms controlling these patterns and possible metrics for
assessing the
strengths of these mechanisms
-
The commonalities and limitations of the submitted data sets
- Key PDEF questions possible to address with analyses of the assembled
data
- Data organization and type of analyses needed to address these key questions
- Outline of additional
synthetic papers, writing assignments
- Authorship
- Data policy
- Linkages to other projects like SYNDEEP, Comarge, FMAP
- Future tasks, marching orders and timelines.
Regarding the key questions, 3 main ones were identified as
1) What is the relationship between productivity (i.e., POC) and
diversity in the abyss.
2) What is the relationship between variability in productivity
(i.e., POC) and diversity in the abyss.
3) Are there environmental variables other than productivity that
more strongly influence abyssal diversity and ecosystem function (e.g.,
sediment characteristics, oxygen, CaCO3 saturation, temperature,
hydrostatic pressure, sediment Corg content, distance to nearest
slope)?
To approch these questions, it was agreed on comparing the
species datasets with datasets on POC flux data (based on different
models) that Derek has collected. For this analysis,d ifferent kinds of
diversity measures and analysing models were discussed.
To see the summary of the workshop, the list of participants or the data agreement, download the files here:
