Summit Rationale
The natural world is not idly standing by as people alter the planet: over timescales of decades and less, myriad organisms are evolving and adapting to human-caused environmental change. This unexpectedly swift response by the natural world has substantial implications for science, society and policy. From pathogens to weeds, fish to trees, rapid evolution is reshaping the world, and with it our health prospects, economy, agriculture and ecosystems. The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in synthesizing approaches to these challenges across the life sciences.
This proposal will fund US academic participation in a groundbreaking international Workshop in Applied Evolution, at the Heron Island Research Station on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, in January 2010. Titled 'Interdisciplinary Solutions to Evolutionary Challenges in Food, Health and the Environment', the workshop will bring together for the first time experts in evolutionary approaches to health and medicine, sustainable agriculture, commodities production and conservation. Bilaterally from the US and Australia, plus other regional partners, forty leading international scientists, practitioners, policymakers and junior scholars will explore the options for sustainable solutions vital to development needs in public health, genetic engineering, food production, ecosystem services, natural resources and biodiversity that take into account the evolutionary dynamics within and around us.
Broader impacts of this workshop are expressed by its four goals, which are to:
- Synthesize and integrate evolutionary approaches across disciplines in the biomedical, agricultural, natural resource and conservation sciences.
- Develop collaborative initiatives between US and international scholars.
- Cultivate linkages between evolutionary modelers and sustainable management practitioners in public health, agriculture and conservation.
- Foster exchange, collaboration, implementation and dissemination between academia, industry and government, including a Special Issue of the Wiley-Blackwell journal Evolutionary Applications (January 2011).
This venture has grown from seed funds from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission to build linkages across the Pacific. UC-Davis faculty are organizing the workshop jointly with major programs of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the University of Queensland (UQ). Both institutions have made substantial funding and staff commitments to the workshop. The Editors of Evolutionary Applications and other US researchers are also serving a variety of supporting roles. Dissemination of workshop products, before and after publication of the journal special issue, will be primarily through the meeting web site. The site will feature abstracts, white papers, forums and presentation videos from the meeting. Immediate synergistic activities will include a focus on marine conservation and meetings at Australian research institutes and with government officials.
As the practical necessity of applied evolutionary biology is being widely recognized for the first time, research hotspots are developing in Australia and a few other centers around the globe. To help build these hotspots into a self-sustaining network with the US at its center, we are requesting travel support to the workshop for a broad cross-section of US senior scientists and junior scholars.