This working group is the first meeting of a formal international academic collaboration network around the topic of integration of theories in ecology. The network is called Network for Ecological Theory Integration (NETI) and its founding members are a group of scientists from Chile, the US, Australia, and Europe. NETI represents the culmination of a long process initiated in 2006 in the context of a workshop organized by Dr. Pablo Marquet in Valparaíso Chile (Field Workshop on Ecological Complexity) attended by scientists representing several major theories: the Metabolic Theory of Ecology, the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology, Ecological Network Theory, and Neutral Theory. After this foundational meeting we held a meeting at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and a workshop at The Santa Fe Institute. A recent article (Marquet et al. 2014) in Bioscience called “On theory in ecology” is one outcome from that early set of meetings. NETI is envisioned as a collaborative, integrative framework for following through on topics from those early meetings, in particular the development of efficient theories in ecology and their integration. We plan to hold three meetings towards this end: one in Chile, one at the Santa Fe Institute, and one in Prague.
This Working Group to be held in Chile.