Meeting Theme

“From Oceans to Mountains: It’s All Ecology”

That’s right! Ecology is everywhere. Whether we are exploring the depths of the ocean, arid desert communities, or frigid mountaintops, we find abundant ecological interaction among organisms and environment. These fascinating relationships abound in every setting. California is an especially interesting setting for studying ecology. It has all these and more! Its 160,000 square miles is a center of extraordinary biodiversity and endemism, containing more plant and animal species and more endemic species than any other state in the United States. Its biological richness is a consequence of its physical complexity from the Pacific Ocean to the high Sierra Nevada Mountains, distributed along a 1000 mile distance from north to south that creates widely varying local bioclimatic conditions overlaid on the strong regional Mediterranean climate with mild wet winters and hot dry summers and its highly varied edaphic conditions. California may be seen as an ecological island separated from the rest of the continent by its high mountains and deserts. Our theme emphasizes the inherent ecological diversity of the state, fitting well between the theme of the 98th Annual Ecological Society of America Meeting’s emphasis on learning from the past and the 100th Annual Meeting in 2015 which will develop a blueprint to shape the future.