Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Fieldwork, ESA, and Moving

The last few weeks have been filled with fieldwork in New Hampshire, travel to Portland, OR for the annual Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting, and moving from our home out near Stony Brook to a new place in Nassau County (closer to NYC and to my wife's new job) - hence the lack of posts.  Here's a brief post concerning my experiences at the recent ESA meeting.

While in Portland I participated in some audiocasts with a group of friends and colleagues, during which we discussed some conference highlights.  At the end of each day (the meeting was four full days) we gathered and talked about one standout presentation we saw that day.  Give a listen to these audiocasts if you're curious a) what ecologists think and say about each others presentations, b) if you're curious what I thought were a few standout talks, and c) if you want a bit more than an hours worth of entertainment.  The audiocasts can be downloaded from my friend Gabe Yospin's website for our MondayWednesday, and (coming soon) Thursday sessions.  Gabe also did solo sessions on Sunday and Tuesday that are worth listening to.

This was my first ESA meeting and I must say, I was impressed.  ESA is a (relatively) large meeting, approximately 4,500 people this year.  There are more than twenty concurrent sessions at a time! Which means during any session there was usually more than one talk I wanted to see.  Also, the conference center was so large that if back-to-back sessions were on opposite ends of the center, it was almost impossible to see both talks in their entirety (had to leave one early and still showed up at the other late).    But these problems aside, I was definitely impressed and inspired by the science reported at this meeting.

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