Pan-European Biogeodynamics network EUROBIG: outstanding challenges and opportunities

It is becoming increasingly well understood that the Earth’s interior and surface evolution is intrinsically interrelated with the evolution of its atmosphere, oceans, landscape and life. This understanding lays down principal foundations of Biogeodynamics – an emerging scientific field that explores the interface of geodynamics, geomorphology, climate, ocean and atmosphere sciences, biology and ecology in order to understand how the evolution of the planetary interiors, surface, atmosphere, ocean, climate, and life is coupled. Despite its strong scientific, educational and societal potential, Biogeodynamics has not been yet fully established as a new discipline. An intrinsically cross-disciplinary character of Biogeodynamics creates organizational, educational and scientific challenges due to the necessity of truly collaborative research and education to efficiently combine scientific knowledge, research tools and training approaches from the very different research fields (such as Earth Sciences, Biology, Ecology, Climate Sciences and Planetology), which evolved independently from each other. To address these challenges, recently approved COST Action EUROBIG (https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA23150/) established the first pan-European Biogeodynamics network, which currently includes >100 scientists from 26 countries. The envisaged EUROBIG networking activities will accelerate the development of Biogeodynamics as a discipline in Europe and worldwide by supporting and linking the relevant communities, facilitating interactions to address the important scientific, methodological, educational, networking and funding challenges of this new field. Here, I will present in short the EUROBIG COST Action, which is open for new participants interested in building, advancing and leading the global Biogeodynamics research community. I will also review some recent advances in computational Biogeodynamics to show why and how the unique Earth's global evolution style - plate tectonics – is coupled to biosphere dynamics thereby accelerating life evolution and controlling biodiversity dynamics. Implications from Biogeodynamics for finding habitable Earth-like exoplanets and for the future dynamics and longevity of human civilization will also be discussed.