February 2, 2021
K-State's Dodds leads special journal issue on macrosystems biology
Submitted by Division of Communications and Marketing
A special issue in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment has been led by Walter Dodds, university distinguished professor of biology; and co-editors Sudeep Chandra, associate professor of biology at the University of Nevada Reno; and Songlin Fei, professor of forestry and natural resources at Purdue University.
The special issue, "Macrosystems Biology — Challenges and Successes," published Feb. 1 by the Ecological Society of America, includes eight papers by more than 70 authors from around the world.
"Macrosystems biology is a new research field that considers large scale biological processes up to and including continental scales," Dodds said. "The issue is a product of a decade of developments in the research field."
K-State is part of several large collaborative projects involving macrosystems biology research, which have been supported by the National Science Foundation, Dodds said. Many of the projects involve the National Ecological Observatory Network, which has terrestrial and aquatic sites across the continent, including three in Kansas, one of which is at Konza Prairie Biological Station.
The issue includes the following papers:
- "Macrosystems revisited: Challenges and successes in a new subdiscipline of ecology."
- "The evolution of macrosystems biology."
- "Macrosystems as metacoupled human and natural systems."
- "Addressing data integration challenges to link ecological processes across scales."
- "Training macrosystems scientists requires both interpersonal and technical skills."
- "Multi-scale biodiversity drives temporal variability in macrosystems."
- "Reconciling carbon-cycle processes from ecosystem to global scales."
- "Working across space and time: Nonstationarity in ecological research and application."
