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Dear list members, We would like to invite you to consider submitting an abstract to our upcoming organized session for the annual American Geophysical Union Fall meeting in San Francisco to be held 11-15 December 2006: B04: Insights on Human Impacts on the Environment From Spatial Variation in Stable Isotope Ratios If your work explores spatial variation in stable isotope ratios, we think you will find this an exciting and engaging session and hope you’ll consider being part of it. The session will be co-sponsored by the Biogeosphere-Atmosphere Stable Isotope Network (BASIN), and will include invited participants who are making important advances in this area. A description of the session follows: Like most Earth system processes, human activities are distributed heterogeneously in space, concentrating in one region and being nearly absent from another. As a result, spatially resolved data provide opportunities to document and understand patterns and processes of human impacts on the environment. Spatially heterogeneous changes in land use and land cover, for instance, allow us to observe the effects of land use change on fluxes of carbon to and from the land surface. The spatial distribution of various human activities and the footprints of their impacts on geochemical, environmental and biotic systems are not necessarily equivalent however. For example, localized surface water impoundment might profoundly affect downstream flow rates, and point sources of atmospheric nitrogen pollution may increase atmospheric nitrogen deposition over large areas. Perhaps the greatest spatial integrator of all is the climate system, which responds at regional to global scales to anthropogenic forcers ranging from point sources to globally distributed activity. In order to fully capitalize on the inherent information in the spatiotemporal patterns of human/environment coupling, unprecedented efforts will be required to collect spatially explicit data and develop modeling and computing tools linking spatially heterogeneous human activities with their spatially distributed environmental impacts. As tracers and recorders of natural processes, stable isotopes represent an important tool for monitoring the environment at a variety of spatial scales and over time. In particular, spatial monitoring and analysis of stable isotope data has great and underdeveloped potential to aid the study of human environmental impacts through improving quantification and tracing of natural and anthropogenic biogeochemical processes. This session will provide a venue for discussing the current state of knowledge of spatial variation in environmental stable isotope ratios, and how that knowledge can improve our understanding of human environmental impacts. We envision three primary, overlapping topics to be addressed: 1. Spatially explicit data gathering and isotope networks, 2. Interpreting and modeling stable isotope spatial variation, and 3. Interfacing stable isotope information with other spatially explicit data. Co-organizers: Jason West Gabe Bowen -- ________________________________ Jason B. West Research Assistant Professor Department of Biology University of Utah Ph: 801.587.3404 Fax: 801.581.4665 Email: jwest@biology.utah.edu http://isoscapes.org ________________________________ |
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