Conference: Advances in Mathematical Ecology

This award will support a workshop on June 2-3, 2023, at the University of Pittsburgh (https://www.mathematics.pitt.edu/eco23). The workshop will provide an opportunity for junior researchers, including graduate and undergraduate students, postdocs, early career faculty, as well as experienced mathematicians and biologists to learn innovative research practices on advances in mathematical ecology. Particularly, the workshop will be an interdisciplinary event that brings together researchers from Mathematics and Ecology to discuss the effects of ecological factors such as changes in environmental conditions on species adaptation, migration, and coexistence. These topics will be addressed via talks and poster presentations based on experimental data, modeling approaches, and theoretical and computational mathematics. As such, the workshop will promote connections across areas of mathematics and facilitate the exchange of ideas between mathematics and other areas such as ecology, natural resource management, evolutionary biology, and computer science. The workshop includes activities for broadening participation of the underrepresented groups and promoting equity and inclusion in the mathematical sciences. Specifically, participants are selected to promote equity and diversity across participants and include researchers and trainees from a diverse pool of career stages, both from local and nationwide institutions. With the speaker's consent, slides and recordings from conference talks will be posted on the conference webpage to achieve an even broader dissemination of results and impact. All participants will be encouraged to submit their work to the Journal of Biological Systems, an open-access platform, which agreed to feature a special issue dedicated to this workshop. The workshop “Advances in Mathematical Ecology” aims to increase the research activities and interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers from mathematics, ecology, natural resource management, evolutionary biology, and computer science. Although the mathematical analysis of ecological models often neglects environmental variability to aid in the attainment of analytical results, experimental data suggests that ecologically important traits can evolve rapidly in response to environmental changes/variability. This may affect species fitness, persistence, migration, and immune systems and highlights the need to incorporate environmental fluctuations into efforts to predict how species will respond to such environmental factors. Indeed, understanding how species respond to changing environments is fundamental for the sustainable management of species and their ecosystems. The workshop will highlight the impact of environmental changes as measured from experimental and analyzed data, techniques for the implementation of environmental fluctuations in ecological and eco-evolutionary models, and methods to study the effects thereof on how species evolve over time. The specific workshop topics will include: i) Methods of implementing environmental fluctuations in spatio-temporal ecological models with a comparison of seasonal forced model parameters and models including probabilistic parameters. ii) The potential and limitations of data-driven models in ecology, and their alignment with theoretical models. iii) Experimentally observed and model-predicted effects of environmental changes on the dispersal of species, on the interaction across species, and on how species respond to diseases. These topics involve links across the areas of Mathematical Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Nonlinear Dynamical Systems, Stochastic Dynamics, Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations, Calculus of Variations, and Statistics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.