I always attend the Ecological Society of America’s Annual Meeting. The last ESA I missed was the 1992 Hawaii meeting (“the meeting without graduate students”) because I was in the middle of moving from Florida to Illinois with a pregnant wife (“you are not leaving for Hawaii right now!”). I’ve not moved jobs since then and haven’t missed an ESA either. But, this year I’m missing ESA’s meeting in Minneapolis, MN, because I will be instead attending INTECOL in London as part of the British Ecological Society’s Centenary Celebrations.

I’ll be attending ESA vicariously through Twitter (#ESA2013), by listening to my students practice their talks before they leave for Minnesota (Lauren Schwartz COS 29-7 “A comparison of survivorship and fecundity of four Amaranthaceae species”; Jason Willand COS 62-1 “The influence of population source and species pools on propagule supply in an experimental grassland”, and Laurel Wilson COS 62-3” Plant community response to regional sources of dominant grasses in grasslands restored across a precipitation gradient”), and through wishing that I was going to hear talks and see posters to be given by some of the Journal of Ecology Associate Editors including, Ignasi Bartomeus (COS 103-5 “Pollinator ecological traits mediate the loss of pollination services with agricultural intensification”), Scott Chamberlain (COS 63-9 “Contribution of traits and phylogenetic history to plant-pollinator network structure”), Franciska de Vries (Symp 4-4 “Harnessing soil communities for N retention”), Jason Fridley (COS 110-2 “Leaf phenology and plant invasions: a role for genome size?”), and Frank Gilliam (OOS 26-9 “Variation in biotic linkages with slope aspect in a temperate hardwood forest”). Several other Journal AEs are co-authors on papers too.  More on what some of them are anticipating at ESA later on this blog.

I’m also upset to be missing the Sunday workshop that JEcol AEs Roberto Salguero-Gomez (@DRobcito) and Eelke Jongejans are organizing on “Demography in a Continuous World: New Advances in Integral Projection Models (IPMS)”. These models are, to some extent, an alternative to the more well-known population projection models, but offer some particular advantages (e.g., there’s no need to assign individuals to discrete size- or stage-classes). Roberto and AE Hans de Kroon recently coordinated a Journal of Ecology Special Feature on Advances in Plant Demography using Matrix Models where some important advances in the use of IPMs were also presented.

All of these presentations promise to be interesting and excellent talks, and I’ll be looking to finding them posted on figshare (or comparable outlet) and discussed via the social media (again, #ESA2013). Do stop by the BES stand in the convention hall and meet Andrea Baier the Managing Editor for Journal of Ecology and Journal of Applied Ecology. Andrea will be happy to discuss ideas that you might have for papers that you might wish to submit to either journal. Her blog posting follows, and she will be live tweeting from ESA (@JEcology, @BaierAndrea).  See you in London (#INTECOL2013)!

David Gibson

Executive Editor, Journal of Ecology