Conference: Macrosystems Biology and NEON-Enabled Science Investigator Meeting 2024

Most of the world’s pressing environmental problems, including climate change, habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, pollution, and unsustainable water use are the product of interactions between human societies and ecosystems that occur at regional, continental, and global scales. Therefore, we need rigorous and actionable science at these large spatial scales that can be used to inform environmental policy and management. This conference will bring researchers funded by the Macrosystems Biology – NEON Enabled Science (MSB-NES) program together to share their research findings and discuss new efforts to study and address environmental problems across large spatial scales. The conference will also promote training and professional development by offering a series of plenaries on team science; diversity, equity and inclusion; safe and inclusive working environments; and open and transparent science. It will also foster the development of national research talent by offering a venue for early career and senior researchers to interact and network across the broad range of MSB-NES funded projects. This conference will support a meeting of researchers funded by the NSF Macrosystems Biology and Neon Enabled Science (MSB-NES) program. This meeting will build on prior meeting themes of collaboration, inclusive research, and open and transparent science. This meeting will have three primary goals: 1) Providing networking and community-building opportunities among actively funded MSB-NES PIs and researchers. 2) Providing learning opportunities for the community through a series of plenary speakers that will focus on topics fundamental to the macrosystems biology community. And 3) coordinating the production of a Macrosystem Biology special issue in a scientific journal that highlights MSB-NES research and our meeting themes. 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.