ESA 2014

Post date: Aug 15, 2014 10:31:03 PM

This marks the last day of the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. I have to admit, entering the week of the conference I had low hopes for making much of the conference. At the close, however, I've been quite happy with my week. I learned about two awesome postdoc opportunities. One is at USGS working on modeling of ecosystem services linked to landscape change. As a result, I've had the chance to talk to folks from USGS (notably Jay Diffendorfer and a post doc Julie Beston) and have learned a lot about the USGS life and opportunities there. I also learned about a postdoc position at CEED in Australia and chatted with postdocs Nathalie Butt and Joseph Bennett.

I saw some pretty cool talks and met some great people through those. Scott Harrison at the University of British Columbia gave a talk that actually asked the audience to reconsider our perspective, something that is generally promised but missing from ESA talks and that I really appreciated. There were too many other talks that I enjoyed to list.

Finally, I was really happy to get to catch up with Anne Trainor who is working on similar stuff to me. We seem to jive in our thinking, which is great to experience.

Finally finally, I gave a talk this morning... one of the Friday morning talks, which are notoriously under-attended. Mine was no exception. That said, after my talk I did get to chat briefly with Barbara Martinez (sorry, no good website), who works for the EPA and had some suggestions on who to talk to about my work.

In the spirit of networking and connections, I'll leave off with my Acknowledgements slide from my talk.