CCPO Speaker to Present Research on Fundamental Laws for Marine Ecosystems

Lora Harris, a researcher with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, will speak on new efforts to identify fundamental laws for marine ecosystems at Old Dominion University's Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography (CCPO) at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 19.

The seminar, and a reception with refreshments beginning at 3 p.m., are free and open to the public. The CCPO is on the third floor of Innovation Research Building 1 in University Village.

The title of the seminar is "Applying Fundamental Laws to Estuarine Ecosystems."

Apart from Darwinian natural selection, ecologists possess few quantifiable, testable hypotheses and predictive theories that might be used to construct models of coastal ecosystems. Harris will discuss efforts to apply thermodynamic constraints on metabolism, body size and population densities to predict primary production and ecosystem processes.