Symposium, distinguished lecture and awards
Colorado State University’s Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory will celebrate its history of excellence in ecosystem science from 1-5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20 at the NREL Today: Symposium and Distinguished Ecosystem Ecologist Lecture and Awards Ceremony in Ballroom 350 C in the Lory Student Center.
A reception and Poster Session also will be held from 5-6:30 p.m. in Ballroom 350 D, Lory Student Center.
Click here for full agenda and presentation titles.
Excellence in Ecosystem Science
The NREL Award of Excellence in Ecosystem Science was established by NREL in 1997. It is presented to an individual(s) whose independent and interdisciplinary research has contributed to sustained, innovative syntheses and new insights in the study of ecosystems. The 2014 awardees are Dr. Eldor Paul, NREL Senior Research Scientist and Professor of Soil and Crop Science at CSU, and Dr. William Schlesinger, President Emeritus at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.
‘Moving from Assessment to Action’
The 2011 Award of Excellence in Ecosystem Science recipient, Terry Stuart Chapin III of the University of Alaska, will give the keynote address “Moving from Assessment to Action: Linking Top-down with Bottom-up Adaptation Planning for Global Change.”
The Symposium will showcase past and present ecosystem science research with short talks given by NREL scientists, concluding with a presentation by guest speaker and former NREL scientist, David Schimel, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
A reception and poster session featuring NREL and Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability graduate student research will immediately follow – all are encouraged and welcome to attend.
Coffee social
CSU’s School for Global and Environmental Sustainability will also host a coffee social with Chapin November 19 from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. in Room 108, Johnson Hall. All are welcome to attend. Coffee, pastries, fruit and juice will be served
2014 award recipients
Eldor A. Paul
Eldor A. Paul is a senior research scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory and a professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Colorado State University. Eldor has had a lifelong interest in teaching and research in both grassland ecology and agroecosystems, ranging from wheat fields in Canada, through corn-belt rotations in the Great Lakes region of the United States, into the afforested systems in California and Colorado. Eldor is a Fellow of the American Society of Agronomy, Soil Science Society of America, Canadian Society of Soil Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received the Soil Ecological Society Professional Award, the SSSA Soil Research Award, and SSSA F.E. Clark Lectureship Award in Soil Biology.
William Schlesinger
William H. Schlesinger is president emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, a private ecological research institute on the grounds of the Cary Arboretum in Millbrook, N.Y. Completing his A.B. at Dartmouth (1972), and Ph.D. at Cornell (1976), he moved to Duke University in 1980, where he was Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and James B. Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry. Schlesinger is the author or coauthor of over 200 scientific papers on subjects of environmental chemistry and global change and the widely-adopted textbook Biogeochemistry: An analysis of global change (3rd edition with Emily S. Bernhardt, Elsevier, 2013). He was among the first to quantify the amount of carbon held in soil organic matter globally, providing subsequent estimates of the role of soils and human impacts on forests and soils in global climate change. He was elected a member of The National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and was President of the Ecological Society of America for 2003-2004. He is also a fellow in the American Geophysical Union, and the Soil Science Society of America.
Terry Chapin II, Keynote Speaker
As director of the graduate educational program in Resilience and Adaptation at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Chapin studies human-fire interactions in the boreal forest. A professor of ecology in the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Fairbanks, AK), Chapin was the first Alaskan elected to the National Academy of Sciences. His initial research concentrated on the adaptation of plants to changing environmental conditions and has evolved to investigating the dynamics of socio-ecological systems under changing conditions. Among the honors Chapin has received are the Kempe Award for Distinguished Ecologist in 1996, the Usabelli Award for the top researcher in all fields from the University of Alaska in 2000, and the ESA Sustainability Science Award in 2008. Chapin is former president of ESA and the 2011 recipient of the NREL Excellence in Ecosystem Science Award.
More information
For more information about the event, visit the website or email Laurie.Richards@colostate.edu.
