Diverse Structures and Hidden Meanings: Synthesizing Information, Energy and Matter to Understand Ecology of a Changing World

Ecology is the science of living systems, with a vast empirical domain that includes a single protist searching for resources to the sustainability of the global ecosystem. As one species - humans - dominates the planet's ecology, scientists still struggle to understand the laws governing living systems that span such broad scales of space, time and biological organization. This conference builds on recent efforts to unify understanding of disparate ecological systems and clades across scales into a single framework. Despite major advances based on flows of energy and materials across scales from organism to ecosystem, leading unifying theories spanning scales of ecological organization have yet to formally integrate existing knowledge about the very thing that makes living systems "living": information.

A unified ecological science can help to address major challenges like identifying limits to consequences of global change, designing exploitation and conservation systems that respect the joint flows of information, matter and energy as components of resilience, and identifying new horizons in research in a living, changing planet. Ecological information includes structural information (e.g., classic metrics of biodiversity, genomes, of food web modules) as well as the semiotic nature of information (communication, organismal traits and cognition). Flows of information can influence flows of energy and materials, and vice versa, across scales from genes to ecosystems. Potential synergies between metabolic scaling theory, ecological stoichiometry, concepts of information may lead to new insights and better understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes and outcomes.

Leading thinkers using different approaches to unify ecological understanding will join specialists studying particular ecological systems are challenged share diverse perspectives and to fearlessly pursue a general understanding of ecological systems. Speakers will address this theme in talks on behavioral ecology, biodiversity, stoichiometry, allometric scaling, temperature effects on ecosystems, and information in physics. This meeting is for any scientist interested in a coherent, multi-scale ecological science.