Call for abstracts: AGU Fall Meeting session on "Telecoupling framework as an integrated platform to capture, study and manage complexity in a changing world"

Scholars may submit an abstract for our session at the Fall Meeting of the American Geographical Union (AGU) to be held in San Francisco, December 12-16, 2016. The title of the session is:Telecoupling framework as an integrated platform to capture, study and manage complexity in a changing world. A brief description of the session is offered below.

The deadline for abstract submissions is Wednesday, 3 August 23:59 EDT at fallmeeting.agu.org.

Session ID# 13970

Session Description: The integrated framework of telecoupling (http://www.telecoupling.org) offers a powerful new template to study socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances across the world. It has been applied to a number of globally important issues, such as land use and land cover change, international trade (e.g. energy, water, food, and forest products), species invasion, flows of ecosystem services, and migration. It allows researchers to address human-nature interactions beyond borders, a situation that can frequently be found in the complex Anthropocene. Its applications and study results have already been shown to produce powerful results across sectors and continents with high impact and buy-in. Here we show how the framework of telecoupling is applied to address fundamental questions across the traditional disciplines. This session will present a representative cross-section of applications, which enable scientists to explore the relevance of telecoupling, why it matters and how the framework helps to gain a better understanding of global, complex real-world processes.

Special issue on telecoupling

Authors of relevant presentations are also welcome to submit their papers to a special issue entitled “Telecoupling: A New Frontier for Global Sustainability” in the interdisciplinary journal Ecology and Society (http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/). The special issue seeks to bring together the latest advances and applications in the field of telecoupling to tackling real-world sustainability issues across diverse systems and at local to global scales. The papers will have a common thread in seeking to operationalize the telecoupling framework in order to understand globally-important processes that span great distances and affect both human and natural components of complex systems.

Each year, Ecology and Society chooses two paper awards among the papers published. The “Ralf Yorque Memorial Award for Best Paper” is given each year to a paper that provides novel contributions to integrative science and policy research and the “Science and Practice of Ecology and Society Award” is given to a paper that applies an innovative transdisciplinary approach in practice to tackle real-world problems. For example, the 2013 foundational paper on the telecoupling framework was chosen as the Ralf Yorque Awardee for Best Paper of 2013. All papers in the special issue are also eligible for consideration for these awards.

Please let us know if you have any questions or if you are interested in submitting an abstract. Thanks.

Falk Huettmann, EWHALE lab, Inst. of Arctic Biology, Biology & Wildlife Dept, University of Alaska at Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA (fhuettmann@alaska.edu), http://faculty.iab.uaf.edu/falk_huettmann

Jianguo “Jack” Liu, Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA (liuji@msu.edu), http://csis.msu.edu/people/jianguo-liu