OOS 13

New Perspectives for Ecology during the Anthropocene: New Paradigms, Technologies and Collaborations

We are living in the Anthropocene, an era where human activities have strong influences on Earth systems, and where anthropogenic biomes, fragmented landscapes, and the use of nature to provide services and good for humans is increasingly the norm. The human population continues to increase, as do associated factors such as anthropogenic climate change and globalized dispersal of organisms. As a result we are now sailing into uncharted territory, where most terrestrial and aquatic systems are simultaneously embedded within a human-dominated landscape, and are being shaped directly or indirectly by human activities. The session focuses on providing a synthetic overview of how Anthropocene dynamics are imposing unintentional re-design of nature, generating new human-environment-species associations and driving the ongoing worldwide extinction crisis. For this we have put together a series of talks focusing on Evaluating, monitoring and Managing, the effects of human activities on ecological systems. These talks focus on two main topics. First, the use of new technologies, interdisciplinary perspectives, and unplanned global biodiversity experiments as ways both to measure ecological changes in the Anthropocene and rethink ecological research strategies to understand the dynamics of novel, globally connected, and continuously changing ecosystems. Second, the importance of framing policy and community engagement with the Anthropocene in mind and how ecological research should focus on understanding how anthropogenic ecosystems are formed, operate, and are expected to change under the current rates of biotic homogenization and major changes in land-use and climate.