Southwest Chapter’s 2022 Organized Oral Session
The Southwest Chapter’s 2022 Organized Oral Session: “The Interactive Effects of Global Change Drivers of Dryland Ecosystems of the Western U.S.”
Each year, our Chapter organizes an oral session for the annual meeting to showcase some of the amazing work being done in our region. This year’s theme is interactive effects of global change drivers in dryland ecosystems. We would like to thank our organizers Sam Jordan, Steven Lee, Tyson Terry, and Brooke Osborne for their work bringing it together! We have a great line up of speakers – be sure to add it to your schedule and reach out if you have theme suggestions for future sessions and events!
Session summary:
Earth’s largest biome, drylands, remains poorly understood relative to more mesic systems, particularly in how we understand ecosystem responses to multiple, overlapping global change drivers. In the drylands of western North America, climate, land use, and human populations are changing quickly, with decreased ecosystem functioning often a result. Predicting and mitigating the negative effects of global change remains a central challenge in ecology, and we are just beginning to more deeply understand how productivity and diversity in dryland systems respond to these multiple global change drivers. Research budgets and logistics often limit studies to focus on single global change drivers, but we clearly must address how these drivers interact across space and time. There is both a large need and an excellent opportunity in time to synthesize how global change drivers interact in dryland systems, integrating across spatiotemporal scales and disciplines.
The density of manipulative experiments and ecosystem modeling efforts in North American drylands creates a unique opportunity to test and revise existing theory across ecosystem types and global change drivers. Specifically, untangling responses and attributing specific mechanisms across these inherently stochastic systems may only be possible by synthesizing across disciplines and approaches. As ecologists, we aim to place our theory squarely on a mechanistic understanding of our study systems, and creative synthesis across research efforts is our best hope at achieving this goal, especially among those with a robust working knowledge of their study systems. This session will bring together researchers with deep expertise in dryland biotic functioning and conduct research across spatial scales, ecosystems, and disciplines to advance our understanding of this large and misunderstood biome.