The Role of Nutrients, Metabolism, and Physiology

Predicting how species and ecosystems will respond to global changes is one of the most daunting challenges to face biologists. To overcome this challenge, biologists will need a unified theory of ecological and evolutionary responses that integrates from individuals through the biosphere. Creating such a theory has been difficult, because each researcher typically focuses on only a single level of organization (e.g., organisms, populations, ecosystems) or a single spatiotemporal scale (e.g., a meter squared vs. the entire globe or one year vs. millions of years). The 2014 Gordon Research Conference on Unifying Ecology Across Scales will focus on linking biological processes across scales through laws that govern the transfer of energy and nutrients. Energy and nutrients play a critical role not only in the ecology and evolution of organisms but also in the dynamics of ecological systems ranging from populations to the biosphere. This conference will serve as a nexus for scientists integrating physiology, stoichiometry, genetics, and evolution with ecological processes at local to global scales.