Terrestrial Ecosystem Response to Atmospheric and Climatic Change (TERACC): An International Network of Global Change Scientists.

TERACC is an international research coordination network of global change scientists representing over 150 individual research sites in 26 countries. The central goals of TERACC are to: (1) integrate and synthesize existing research on ecosystem responses to individual global change drivers; (2) foster new research on whole-ecosystem responses to the combined effects of elevated atmospheric CO2, warming, and other aspects of global change, and (3) promote better communication and integration between experimentalists and modellers. TERACC is addressing these goals and objectives by workshops, data syntheses, communication and education.

Since 2000, TERACC has sponsored or co-sponsored ten workshops involving over 350 people from 14 countries and has supported three major data syntheses. A signature of TERACC meetings is bringing together an approximately equal number of interdisciplinary experimentalists and modellers. TERACC is also committed to helping to educate the next generation of global change scientists and to increase the participation of under-represented groups in global change research. As such, another signature of TERACC meetings is the active participation of graduate students to comprise 10-15% of the participant list for each meeting.

Results from TERACC and other syntheses have greatly increased our understanding of the short- to mid- term responses of terrestrial ecosystems and their components to elevated atmospheric CO2, warming, changes in water availability, and other human-induced vectors of global change. However, despite these advances, urgent and immediate needs remain for a sound scientific basis for national and international policies regulating carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions. In order to meet these complex needs in a timely fashion, TERACC advocates a unified multidisciplinary approach to understanding ecosystem response to global change which better integrates observational, experimental, and modelling techniques.

More information on TERACC can be found at: http://www.umaine.edu/teracc