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Credit: BBVA FOUNDATION
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category has gone in this thirteenth edition to ecologists Sandra Díaz (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, and Argentine National Research Council, CONICET), Sandra Lavorel (Laboratoire d Ecologie Alpine [LECA], Grenoble, France, and Landcare Research, Lincoln, New Zealand) and Mark Westoby (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia), for expanding the concept of biodiversity, through their pioneering work to discover, describe and coordinate the measurement of plant functional traits.
Independently and collaboratively, the awardees focused their research on arranging each plant s ecosystem function along dimensions of measurable physical traits, such as height, leaf type or seed size, enabling them to locate patterns in the functional diversity of species at a global level. The catalogue of these functional traits has now become a vast database,
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IMAGE: Neil Adger, winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change. view more
Credit: BBVA FOUNDATION
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change has gone in this thirteenth edition to Neil Adger, Ian Burton and Karen O Brien for changing the paradigm of climate change action, previously confined to mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, by folding in the concept of adaptation to unavoidable impacts.
While earlier editions of the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards have distinguished contributions to climate change science from the realms of modelling, physics or economics, this year s prize recognizes the contribution of the social sciences. Specifically, the committee has selected three researchers who have pioneered the study of how social conditions and culture shape our vulnerability to climate change and our ability to adapt, in the words of the award citation.