The Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology (BiGCB) was recently awarded a $2.5 million dollar grant by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The grant funds seven major projects and involves the participation of faculty members in eight departments including ESPM faculty George Roderick, John Harte, Vince Resh, Patrick O'Grady, Nick Mills, Rosemary Gillespie, Todd Dawson, Neil Tsutsui, and Adina Merenlender.
The overarching goal is to achieve an integrated analysis of fossil, historic and current data to uncover new knowledge of California ecosystems responses to environmental change, which will enable predictions of future ecosystem changes. Projects focus on using novel methods ranging from obtaining a high resolution record of climate change using lake cores to applying theory-based metrics to analyze biological change.
Established in November 2009, BiGCB is an initiative bringing together over 100 Berkeley faculty and researchers to collaborate in the field of global change biology. The Initiative is focused on integrating multiple disciplines to better predict how the biosphere will be affected by global changes through careful understanding of these changes in the past and present.