Leafy Sea Dragon
Overview & Goals - Interdisciplinary PhD
Maintaining the integrity of ocean ecosystems and managing their use in the face of rapid and inevitable global change is one of the greatest challenges of this century. Changes in temperature, sea level, and ocean chemistry will have enormous implications for marine biodiversity and ecosystem function, and for human exploitation of marine resources, human migration, and national security. Scientists and policy makers need to understand and quantify ongoing and potential perturbations to natural processes caused by global change, and to incorporate this knowledge into social policy.
Graduate education, particularly in climate sciences, is frequently a highly focused endeavor, in part because of the wealth of technical knowledge required by the field. Likewise, students in economics and policy often have little exposure to natural sciences despite their importance for framing the social consequences of global change. Clearly, the science and conservation implications of global change demand interdisciplinary understanding, as well as the ability to work in interdisciplinary teams and to communicate effectively to a diverse array of audiences. We seek to address this need by giving our students the tools to understand the interdisciplinary dimensions of global change issues affecting the oceans. Our students will have sufficient knowledge of the intersecting fields to be effective in developing and communicating first-rate global change science and utilizing that science to design effective social policy. Our focus on global issues, integration of physical sciences with marine conservation, and addition of legal, business, policy, and historical aspects of global change science are all novel aspects.
In the coming years we will build on our IGERT (NSF funded - Integrated Graduate Education and Research Training) project that addressed local human impacts on biodiversity by shifting our focus to the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions for Earth's marine ecosystems and the human economic and political systems that depend on them. We will explore both the biological and social consequences of 1) climate change, 2) sea level rise, and 3) ocean acidification. Study of physical and biological systems will be linked to analysis of their social and economic consequences, to the development of conservation and management policies, and to communication strategies that help the public and policy makers make informed choices.
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