This week lots of members of the Journal of Ecology Editorial Board are at ESA in Sacramento. See Executive Editor, David Gibson’s, earlier blog post about what he will be getting up to here. Don’t forget to visit the British Ecological Society’s stand either!

A few members of the Editorial Board have written about their schedules for the meeting. We are kicking off today with what’s on, Associate Editor, Yvonne Buckley’s agenda.

FOOTBALL, PLANT DEMOGRAPHY & TEAM SCIENCE

So I’m on the plane from Dublin to Chicago, the 1st leg of my trip to ESA & it’s the perfect time to plan my schedule. I’m loving the conference scheduling app but it doesn’t make it any easier to choose what talks to see and events to go to – how do I choose between “Pretty darn good control”, “Life history theory” & “Plant defences” on Tuesday afternoon or between “theory for conservation” and “ecological statistics” on Wednesday morning? It’s enough to drive one back to the drinks cart. More than likely chance meetings in the corridors will mess up my schedule anyway, but that’s what conferences are for, right?

I haven’t made it to ESA for around 5 years, since safe-guarding my evolutionary fitness curtailed my travels, so I’m probably most looking forward to meeting old friends & colleagues from Australia, the UK & USA and catching up on what’s new. Fitting nicely with this theme I’ve organised an Ignite session on spatial plant population dynamics on Thursday at 3:30pm (rm 313) which cunningly enables me to meet up with old friends & gives me an excuse to meet some movers & shakers in spatial dynamics. My husband once told me that Bolton’s best 100 goals was a great video “even if you don’t like football”, he was right, and in the same vein I can assure you this will be a cracking session even if you think you aren’t into plant demography ;-).

I’ll be furiously scribbling notes at “The science of team science” special session at 10:15 on Monday as I’ll be launching a new coordinated observational network, PLANTPOPNET at ESA. Find out all about it on Thursday or stop me in the corridor so I don’t have to make agonising session choices.

Yvonne Buckley

Associate Editor, Journal of Ecology