{"id":2001,"date":"2009-11-09T16:53:09","date_gmt":"2009-11-09T20:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/?p=2001"},"modified":"2009-11-09T16:53:09","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T20:53:09","slug":"a-conference-about-water-and-ecology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/2009\/11\/09\/a-conference-about-water-and-ecology\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conference about Water and Ecology"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"grimm_s\"<\/dt>\n
Nancy Grimm welcomes attendees to the first ESA Millennium Conference. <\/span><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

ESA\u2019s first Millennium Conference kicked off today in Athens, GA. The meeting is bringing together ecologists and social scientists to engage in conversations about one of the most dramatic emerging challenges in ecology: that of clean water and water scarcity.\u00a0 While ecologists\u2019 main expertise is in providing and maintaining adequate water for healthy ecosystems, social scientists are expert in and concerned about scarce water and allocation across diverse communities.<\/span><\/p>\n

The discussion this morning focused on several key issues associated with water conservation. Nancy Grimm was the president of ESA when the Millennium series was suggested, and she welcomed the group to the conference. In her opening remarks, she was the first to bring up the fact that for water reform and management to really take hold, it needs to occur at a regional level.\u00a0 All-encompassing water legislation, even at state levels, can pit differing priorities against one another; since ecosystem services are largely delivered at regional scales, their legislation should be regional as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\"dsc00823_s\"<\/dt>\n
Ann Bartuska addresses a question during her talk about urban ecosystem services.<\/span><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

But Carol Couch, formerly chief of environmental protection in Georgia, made the point that a difficult challenge is to learn how to legislate water and water rights among political boundaries.\u00a0 Since ecosystems know no political boundaries, local politicians must learn to work together.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to explore systematically and synthetically how different societies throughout time have dealt with a common pool of resources, so it doesn\u2019t devolve into the tragedy of the commons,\u201d she said. \u201cWe need to start thinking about ecological services as a common pool.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A major challenge, she also mentioned, will be considering water as a common-pool resource in areas, like Georgia, where most (96 percent!) of the land is privately owned. Bob Naiman of Washington University made the great comment that it would be nice to have an \u201copinions map\u201d \u2013 one that showed which people over the landscape have what opinions about water and how it should be used. This could inform management strategies and ground-up community initiatives.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t need to convince people, we just need to speak in words they understand,\u201d she said.\u201dWe could then spend less time advocating for a public campaign \u2013 but instead recruit people to work with us.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A final theme of the first several talks was interdisciplinarity.\u00a0 As co-chair Ted Gragson of UGA pointed out, we\u2019re ready to practice what we\u2019ve often preached about interdisciplinarity. No water problem will be solved by an ecologist or a social scientist alone, which is the whole reason for the conference.<\/span><\/p>\n

Later this afternoon: Roger Pulwarty of NOAA talks about drought and adaptation under climate change, and Emily Bernhardt of Duke talks about freshwatrer ecosystems in an uncertain hydrologic future. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nancy Grimm welcomes attendees to the first ESA Millennium Conference. ESA\u2019s first Millennium Conference kicked off today in Athens, GA. The meeting is bringing together ecologists and social scientists to engage in conversations about one of the most dramatic emerging challenges in ecology: that of clean water and water scarcity.\u00a0 While ecologists\u2019 main expertise is in providing and maintaining adequate…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,89,87,90,10,49,88,48],"tags":[111,382,384,22],"class_list":["post-2001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservation","category-ecology-education","category-news-events","category-history","category-ecology-in-policy","category-scholarship","category-science-journalism","category-ecology-and-society","tag-ecosystem-services","tag-environmental-justice","tag-esa-millennium-conference","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}