Workshop
on
Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Informatics for the Indian River Lagoon, Florida
February 7-8, 2002
DoubleTree Hotel
Cocoa Beach Oceanfront
2080 N. Atlantic Avenue
Cocoa Beach, Florida 32931
321-783-9222 or 1-800-552-3224
FAX: 321-799-3234
Sponsored by
National Science Foundation
Overview
This workshop will facilitate research on the informatics needed to address
complex issues of biodiversity and ecosystem processes within the Indian River
Lagoon. The Indian River Lagoon (IRL) is one of the nation's most biologically
diverse estuarine systems that provides a habitat for hundreds of different
species of animals and plants, many of which are rare or endangered. The Indian
River System is experiencing a number of environmental problems and challenges
such as over-enrichment of nutrients, freshwater inflow, toxic chemicals,
pathogens, habitat loss and introduction of invasive species. This workshop
will provide the opportunity for collaboration and discussion among diverse
fields of biodiversity, ecological sciences, remote sensing, geographic information
systems, computer science and intelligent information processing systems.
Goals
- Investigate novel computational intelligence techniques for modeling,
prediction, analysis, and database management of disparate and complex data
for the Indian River Lagoon.
- Identify problems that are fundamental in making progress toward new research
directions in the field of biodiversity and biocomplexity informatics,
- Discuss current research results and assess the challenges of the current
research activities and explore fruitful collaboration and synergism.
- Formulate a research agenda that incorporates novel informatics tools
into existing and planned research.
- Discuss research initiatives and facilities needed to meet these and future
challenges.
- Identify needed collaborations and roles of potential collaborators.
Topics
Some of the topics that we anticipate to discuss at the workshop include:
- Biodiversity and biocomplexity of the Indian River Lagoon
- Relationships between species composition and biotic interactions, trophic
and habitat relationships: current problems , possible solutions
- Informatics for the biodiversity and biocomplexity of the Indian River
Lagoon: computational intelligence techniques
- Efficient application of biodiversity informatics to region human population
and coastal biocomplexity management entities.
- Issues related to database management techniques, query, analysis and
visualization
- Integration of independently developed (heterogeneous) databases at the
structural and semantic levels.
- Ecological impacts on the Indian River Lagoon system
- Technology, data and analysis needs for detection of long term climatic
trends and climatic effects on regional biocomplexity
- Technology, data and analysis needs for detection of long term human settlement
and human activity effects on regional biocomplexity
