Final Call for Abstracts: Emerging Issues Along Urban/Rural Interfaces: Linking Land-Use Science and Society
This is the final call for abstracts for our conference "Emerging Issues Along Urban/Rural Interfaces: Linking Land-Use Science and Society", to be held April 9-12, 2007 at the Sheraton Atlanta. The conference announcement is below and the deadline for submission of abstracts is January 31, 2007. We have a dwindling pool of money made available by NSF to provide travel grants for students.
Conference Objective
The pace of urbanization and land-use change is accelerating in many parts of the world, leading to rapidly changing environmental conditions along urban-rural interfaces, broadly speaking. In turn, these changing conditions are creating new ecological and societal challenges and opportunities. We seek to bring together researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to share current research results and to identify knowledge gaps regarding the interaction between urbanization, land-use change, and natural resources. In particular, approaches that focus on integrating socioeconomic and ecological research will be highlighted.
Paper topics of interest include:
* How ecosystems are being altered by human influences: direct and indirect stressors
* Restoring/rehabilitating terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems altered by urbanization
* Evaluating changes to ecosystem goods and services along urban/rural gradients
* Monitoring and predicting human influences on landscapes and ecosystems
* How urbanization alters the characteristics of natural disturbances
* The relationship(s) between land-use policies and ecological processes/disturbances
along wildland/urban interfaces
* Informing policy makers, natural resource professionals, and private citizens
* Spatial/scale aspects of land-use change
* Application of ecological research in land-use planning
* Ecosystem impacts on human communities (e.g., human health, economic well-being,
political action)
Please visit the conference website at: http://www.sfws.auburn.edu/urbanruralinterfaces/index.html for more information about submitting an abstract.
