Here’s one: Dimensions of Biodiversity, a program for graduate students funded by the National Science Foundation. It currently boasts 112 grad students from 14 institutions in five countries, with 23 faculty members advising these students.

Their mission? According to their website, “To prepare the next generation of biodiversity researchers for higher levels of academic and scientific interaction, while simultaneously advancing, synthesizing, and baselining knowledge of biodiversity science on a global scale.”

At the AAAS meeting last month, three members of the program talked about a few of the various projects of Dimensions of Biodiversity.

Selina Heppell, a professor at Oregon State University, discussed a project to measure biodiversity in the oceans utilizing commercial fishing data. Samantha Davis, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, described three separate projects looking at the variability in biodiversity in tropical forests. And Ailene Ettinger, a student at the University of Washington, looked at data about the efficacy of citizen science and the data collected by non-scientists. (Her PowerPoint opened with a picture of citizen scientists on the Academy’s roof!)

The young researchers are using existing data in each study, looking at old observations in entirely new ways. All of the projects span many institutions and approach biodiversity beyond species numbers. They look at the diversity of individual species, of course, but they also look at the diversity of groups of species and functions of each species. For example, you can look at functional biodiversity as how many herbivores, carnivores, top predators, and bottom dwellers exist within an ecosystem. Their diagram, above right, demonstrates this and the effects and influences to an ecosystem.

Students drive each endeavor, but they don’t need to select something within their particular program of study. And like the iGem teams, each project includes a diverse group of students—biologists, statisticians, writers, you name it.

And the results? A recent paper about remote sensing in rainforests and two more publications forthcoming (see here and here). Also an online blog that was introduced earlier this year at the popular Science Online conference.

The Academy supports a similar NSF-funded program, this one for undergraduates. The Summer Systematics Institute has been running for an astounding 17 years and “addresses critical issues such as, world-wide threats to biodiversity, the origins and diversification of life, phylogenetic systematics and evolutionary biology, which have become critical components of undergraduate education.” Stay tuned for a video about the SSI program, available on Science Today later this year.

Diagram courtesy of biodiverseperspectives.com

Scientists from all over the globe are studying ice core samples to learn from Antarctica’s past and are trying to predict its future.

In a joint mission called the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program or IODP, researchers are drilling and studying geological samples from the seafloor off the coast of Antarctica. “The new cores offer an unprecedented ability to decipher the history of glaciation in Antarctica,” says Jamie Allen, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Ocean Sciences, which co-funds IODP. “The climate record they preserve is immensely valuable, especially for testing how well current global climate models reproduce past history.”

Sediments and microfossils preserved within the cores document the onset of cooling and the development of the first Antarctic glaciers, as well as the growth and recession of Antarctica’s ice sheets.

When Antarctica was warm those millions of years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were more than ten times higher than they are today. Then, in only 400,000 years—a mere blink of an eye in geologic time—concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide there decreased. Global temperatures dropped. Ice sheets developed. Antarctica became ice-bound.

Now, the giant ice sheets in Antarctica behave like mirrors, reflecting the sun’s energy and moderating the world’s temperatures. The waxing and waning of these ice sheets contribute to changes in sea level and affect ocean circulation, which regulates our climate by transporting heat around the planet.

“We can read these sediments like a history book,” says co-chief scientist Henk Brinkhuis of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “And this book goes back 53 million years, giving us an unprecedented record of how ice sheets form and interact with changes in the climate and the ocean.

“Measurements of parameters such as age, temperature, and carbon dioxide concentration increase the accuracy of these models. The more we can constrain the models, the better they’ll perform–and the better we can predict ice sheet behavior.”

Image: John Beck, IODP/TAMU