Restoration Planning and Policy:

• Incremental Adaptive Restoration (IAR): What is it? How do we do it? What are ‘decision critical uncertainties’ relevant to planning? … Policy? … Science? How do we move forward with IAR?

• Policy Challenges: sustaining the initiative, rising costs, evaluating environmental benefits, including partners

• Integrating ‘risk and uncertainty’ into planning and implementation

• Integrating adaptive management into project planning and implementation, using IAR as 'case study' implementation of adaptive management

• Enhancing communication between planning, policy, science and partners

• Integrating Climate Change into Greater Everglades restoration – planning for a changing and dynamic landscape

Physical and Biogeochemical Processes and Modeling:

• Physical, biogeochemical and hydrologic dynamics of the ridge-and-slough/tree island landscape

• Integrating hydrology of the managed system with the needs of the natural system

• Integrating ‘sheet-flow’ into “getting the water right” – ‘sheet-flow’ as a component driving hydropatterns (depth, duration, distribution), sediment and particulate transport

• Hydrologic Models – advances and new developments, emerging challenges and opportunities, modeling sheet-flow, integrating climate change

Ecology & Ecological Modeling:

• Moving towards the new direction for ecological models – assessment models

• Improving the use of ecosystem history to guide the targets for restoration

• Revisiting and improving Performance Measures, role of modeling

• Understanding the integration of fire, hydrology and cyclical climatic patterns on landscape dynamics

• Integrating biogeochemical (nutrients, contaminants, EPOC) dynamics into sustainable restoration

Compatibility with the Human Landscape:
 

• Land use, economics and demographic trends

• Planning and community involvement; consensus building

• Ecosystem valuation modeling to integrate natural systems into community wealth

Information Systems:

• Challenge of data accessibility and usability; data storage, management and archiving; real-time data access; data visualization; metadata

• WEB access and retrieval; digital libraries

• Decision support systems; Everglades Depth Estimation Network (EDEN)

• Hierarchical approaches to information transfer in support of ecosystem restoration

Synthesis and Integration:

During the online abstract submission process, you will be asked if your work synthesizes science at the total systems landscape scale. Below are examples of emerging topics. If your work focuses on these or similar areas, you should answer YES. Please ensure your abstract clearly reflects synthesis at the total systems landscape scale.

• Future Modeling Needs: linkage between hydrologic models, ecological models, water quality models, landscape-change models – Where are we? What next? How soon? How critical?

• Science for Adaptive Management: research, monitoring and modeling; without monitoring, we are ‘dead in the water’, monitoring must be linked to forecasting (modeling)

• Restoring ‘Natural System’ hydrology (model?): How much water is needed to restore the natural system? – Integrating emerging concepts of paleoecology, coastal salinity, and physical and biogeochemical processes of the sheet-flow landscape

• A ‘Landscape Vision’ for the Greater Everglades: Opportunities at the landscape-scale; carrying capacity of natural lands; integrating multiple uses and recreation; compatible integration of working and natural lands;

• Ecosystem Restoration and Species Conservation: How will restoration affect native species? Invasive species? Imperiled species? What components of restoration are especially important for native species? What new science is available to help us understand the connection between restoration and species conservation? What new science could illuminate the path forward? What are the unknowns?