Grand opportunities: strategies for addressing grand challenges in organismal animal biology.

The Biology Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) has requested that organismal biologists develop a vision and articulate the grand research challenges that will drive the future of organismal biology and the large-scale community-wide efforts that would be needed to address those challenges. Over the past decade, organismal animal biologists have been slow to develop community-wide initiatives relative to other bioscience communities (e.g., molecular biologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and plant biologists). In response to NSF’s request, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) organized an effort to begin to articulate grand visions of the research questions that will form the foundation of future research in organismal animal biology (hereafter referred to as ‘‘organismal biology’’ for brevity). White papers, now known as contributions in the ‘‘Grand Challenges in Organismal Biology’’ (GCOB) series, have been published in Integrative and Comparative Biology over the past 2 years (Denny and Helmuth 2009; Denver et al. 2009; Satterlie et al. 2009; Schwenk et al. 2009; Mykles et al. 2010; Sih et al. 2010). These papers define a number of large-scale forward-thinking research efforts that cross the broad array of disciplines encapsulated by SICB and move organismal biology in new directions: (1) genotype– phenotype relationships,(2) integrating living and physical systems, (3) utilizing functional diversity, (4) organism-environment linkages, (5) evolutionary stability versus change, (6) how non-model organisms work, (7) garnering public support for organismal biology, (8) transforming organismal biology into 21st century science, (9) fostering inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research to yield emergent principles about organisms, (10) community