INNGE Wishes Everyone a Great 2017!
2017 is here. INNGE wishes our early career community a happy, energetic, and prosperous new year. In 2017, we plan to continue to foster cross-continental initiatives among ecological societies and their early career ecologists, as we did in 2016. In particular, we will focus on putting our new online conferencing platform to work for the early career community (more about that in the next newsletter) and on making INTECOL2017 an interesting event for early career ecologists -- see further down for details.
2016 was a great year for INNGE. At the beginning of 2016, we welcomed five new institutional members to INNGE, bringing our membership to 26. Thanks to our Senior Advisory Board and, in particular, Scott Collins, Mark Lonsdale, and Shona Myers. We continue to improve our ongoing initiatives with their great feedback and support.
INNGE was excited to be a co-founder of a new platform for international networks of early career researchers, called the Early Career Researchers' Network of Networks (ECR NoN), which aims to create a stronger early career voice on the international stage.
On the web front, we put together a comprehensive grant/fellowship database which is now available in our wiki. INNGE also launched a webinar series called INNGE Forum for discussing topics in Ecology and relevant for ECRs. Our inaugural webinar was on ECRs engagement with IPBES. Second, we ran a panel discussion with three educational experts on developing core ecological teaching in schools. As a recently launched project, our INNGE Reporter set of blog posts received an exciting response. These posts provide ECRs an opportunity to report on the conferences and other meetings they attend. Our institutional members also worked closely with INNGE and organized a variety of early career events and training in their annual meetings (see the Members' Column below for details).
Governing Board 2017-2018
We recently concluded the annual election for new Governing Board members 2017-2018. This year INNGE’s institutional members elected six new members to the governing board who will join the eight members serving 2016-2017. We are excited to announce that the elected governing board members for 2017-2018 are:
- Julia Clause
- Rachel Hale
- Alice C. Hughes
- Satya Prakash Mehra
- Gwendylon Peyre
- María Poca
Stay tuned for a more in-depth introduction of the new governing board and working group members.
INTECOL 2017, Beijing: Abstract submission ends on 10th February
INTECOL’s quadrennial meeting will be held during 20-25, August 2017 in Beijing, China, on the theme of Ecology and Civilisation in a Changing World. Alice C. Hughes is working as the INNGE representative on the INTECOL Conference Planning board. INNGE also runs a public email list for INTECOL planning. Currently, the list consists of INNGE working group members, but it is open for anyone to subscribe here. The list messages are archived and publicly searchable for those interested in seeing what's being planned.
Important dates to add to your calendar：
- Call for abstracts is now open: submit before 10th February 2017
- Notification of abstract acceptance: 1st April 2017
- Call for exhibition applications is now open
- Early-bird registration deadline: 1st May 2017
- Regular registration deadline: 2nd May to 1st July, 2017
Checkout the comprehensive set of symposia here.
INNGE is looking forward to welcome you in China! The INTECOL Congresses are great international gatherings of Ecologists, and they only happen once every four years!
Introducing Synthesis Centres: Exciting places to explore synthesis research
Synthesis Centres are community-oriented research infrastructures supporting working group meetings and various programs for scientists, such as postdoctoral and sabbatical fellowships and graduate training. These centres offer a unique mixture of leadership, supporting and facilitating creative discovery on issues important for science and society. It is a combination of administrative and data management support, resident scientists, informatics expertise, and most importantly, distraction-free time for group discussions, which promotes creativity and cross-fertilization of ideas. Specific research topics at different centres can be community driven or fall under broader themes (e.g. Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). While there has been an increase in in the number of synthesis centers globally, some centres have either closed (e.g., ACEAS) or changed their focus (e.g. NESCent vs TriCEM or NCEAS). Generally, the scope of research conducted in synthesis centres vary from natural sciences, to -omics, and from medicine to social sciences. Several centres are informally organized in the joint synthesis centre consortium. This consortium meets regularly and plans joint research calls, exchanges experiences on how to support synthesis research more efficiently, or e.g. trying to plan a global synthesis collaboration with Future Earth. As a scientific leader of one of the newest centres, iDiv, Marten Winter strongly (but not objectively) recommends working and meeting at one of those centres. For young, but, also senior scientists, it’s a vibrant place that is filled with opportunities to collaborate with experts from a wide range of disciplines. In sum, synthesis centres offer various programs to support science and young researchers, and are also great places to work as scientists.
Reported by Marten Winter, Dylan Craven at German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig; Leipzig; Germany
Featured Blogs from EcoBloggers
The INNGE website hosts a blog aggregator, EcoBloggers. Our aim is to channel early career blogs and the most popular ecology blogs through a single window. Last year we helped circulate some interesting blogs across the world. We recommend you check out some of the selected stories, below.
INNGE Project Updates:
INNGE Reporter
INNGE was involved in co-organizing activities at three major conferences last year. At the annual meetings of the British Ecological Society (BES), the French Ecological Society, and the Biennial meeting of Ecology (BME), organized by Chilean Society of Ecology and Argentinian Ecological Association, INNGE members helped facilitate early career events. You can read about their success stories under the Members' Column of this newsletter and in their INNGE Reporter blog posts -- see the one about the BES meeting here and the BME meeting here.
If you are attending similar events, INNGE Reporter provides this opportunity to report your experience though our blog, video channel, social media, and this newsletter, which together allow you to reach a global audience. If you are interested in being a reporter please ask Pawel.
INNGE Interview
Over the last six months, INNGE has been conducting a series of interviews focused on revisiting classic papers in ecology, evolution and behaviour. For each, we interviewed one of the paper's authors (usually the first) about the making of the study and what we have learned about the topic since it was first published. So far, we have interviewed 29 key ecological thinkers including: Shahid Naeem, M.V. Srinivasan, Gerald Wilkinson, Nicholas Gotelli, Laurent Keller, William Laurance, Vojtech Novotny, Anders Pape Møller, Peter Morin, Michael Ryan, Betsy Von Holle, Teja Tscharntke, Nicky Clayton, Keith Hobson, John Terborgh, Trevor Price, John Endler, Gary Roemer, Rebecca Kilner, Robert Ricklefs, James Estes, Peter Berthold, Peter Chesson, David Reznick, Paul Dayton, Marion Petrie, Malte Andersson, Andrew Hector, and John Krebs.
We invite you to checkout Hari Sridhar’s Blog and read those awesome stories.
Members' Column
INNGE’s institutional membership is our backbone. In 2016, and years before, they have worked closely with INNGE to foster our aims. Below are some highlights from our members. We congratulate French Ecological Society (SFE) and the Ecological Society of Argentina (ASAE) for kick-starting early career and INNGE-related activities at their conferences. Continuous commitment from the British Ecological Society (BES) and the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in organizing early career activities is also greatly appreciated.
From the French Ecological Society (SFE)
The Sfécologie bi-annual international conference on ecological sciences took place in Marseille, France. It was organized by the Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE) with the support of SFE. This meeting gathered over 900 participants, mostly from France but also quite a lot from Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) and other countries.
Within that big and successful organization -- with many parallel oral sessions, poster sessions, an open conference, five plenaries, a classical concert and gala evening with fun dancing -- Julia, our rep, organized a few early career workshops, with the help of Sylvie Campagne, a fellow early career ecologist. The SFE group of early career ecologists is still very small and recent. Therefore, our goal at the conference was not necessary to plan “big”, but rather to attempt a first approach, to try out things with the resources we had, and to evaluate the interest of such activities among early career researchers (mostly French). Due to time and communication constraints, attendance to the workshops was not mandatory. However, we had set up an online spreadsheet for registration to evaluate the interest of early career ecologists for each workshop. Attendees were mostly PhD students, with a few postdocs.
Our workshops consisted in: i) two “coffee breaks with the speakers” (30 min), ii) a “Publishing” session (1h), and a “Networks” session (1h). i) Although it took a few minutes for attendees to show up at each coffee break -- since they were getting coffee -- each coffee break gathered about 10 students around EJ Millner and Thierry Dutoit for great questions and discussions that even continued after the session. ii) Publishing can be new to some people, and a reminder is always good for more experienced researchers. Wiley Publishing talked about the ‘basic’ process of publishing and Romain David (IMBE) talked about open access from a researcher’s point of view. It was important to us to present a current debate happening in the research community. iii) The aim of the last workshop was to present places where early career ecologists can get involved and find resources. We presented activities at the SFE and within INNGE, Hazel Norman presented opportunities at the British Ecological Society and Wolfgang Cramer presented the Future Earth network. Unfortunately, we had no time for our planned participatory activity.
We got positive feedback from the attendees and we are now hoping to extend our group of volunteers to organize a bigger event for the next Sfécologie meeting in 2018. If we had a tip to remember for next time: always think that you have at least 15 minutes less than what you have originally planned. This is mostly due to earlier sessions finishing late and attendees of next sessions starting to chat in your room.
Reported by Julia Clause, SFE Rep to INNGE
From the Ecological Society of America (ESA)
The 2016 meeting of the Ecological Society of America was held in humid Ft. Lauderdale, FL this past August. There were a large set of talks, workshops, and poster sessions as usual, and a whole set of ECR activities planned by the ESA Student and Early Career Sections. The 2017 meeting will be held in Portland, OR, and is sure to be a big event (because it seems that Ecologists love Portland). Abstracts are due by February 23rd, so if you're planning to go, get to work on writing up your cool science now!
Reported by Naupaka Zimmerman, ESA Rep. to INNGE
From the British Ecological Society
Report on the Early Careers Programme at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the British Ecological Society
On 11th December 2016, some 90 students and ECRs gathered at ACC Liverpool to actively participate in the Early Careers Programme – kick-starting the 2016 Annual Meeting of the British Ecological Society (#BES2016) – the biggest one to date, with over 1200 delegates attending from around the world. The Early Career Programme, collaboratively organised by the BES and INNGE, comprised a series of workshops targeted at students and early-career researchers and supported by both panel discussions and presentations during the Annual Meeting itself. The bumper number of early-career sessions included the following: “How to make the most of meeting”, “How to set-up a productive Twitter account”, “Unlocking your potential”, “How to devise a question for a plenary speaker/senior ecologist”, “From PhD to Post-Doc/From Post-Doc to permanent position”, “Staying employable in and out of academia”, “Communicating effectively from CV to interview”, “How to get published”, “Managing an interdisciplinary career”, and “Building support networks” – phew! Tweets can be accessed for these events by searching for #BEScareers. Due to its success, this Early Careers Programme will be built upon and repeated at next year’s joint BES Annual Meeting in Ghent, Belgium (Dec 2017) – so do come along if you can!
To read a full report on this event, which was thoroughly enjoyed by all involved, please visit our INNGE Reporter page.
Reported by Rachel White, BES Rep. to INNGE
From the Ecological Society of Argentina (ASAE)
Argentinean and Chilean Bi-National Ecological Meeting organized by the Ecological Societies of Argentina and Chile in Puerto Iguazú, Misiones, Argentina, was held during September 18-23. This meeting brought together around 600 ecologists under the theme “Linking nature and society”. Early career ecologists accounted almost half of conference assistants and were well represented across symposia, oral and poster sessions. Particularly relevant, was the symposium presenting INNGE to the broader community; with a high participation not only of early career ecologists, but also senior ecologists interested in strengthening the participation and collaboration of entering professionals across diverse areas within ecology.
This symposium was organized by a small group of early career ecologists from Argentina that last year started a local INNGE sub-group self-called “INNGE: Seeds in the South”. The symposium entitled “ecology and the next generation ecologists: challenges and opportunities in the next decades”, where INNGE’s general objectives and functioning were presented, followed by five inspiring talks about three key topics: (i) academia and the role of ecologists in society, (ii) cooperative networks in ecology, and (iii) science communication beyond scientific literature; presented by invited leaders in ecological science. The symposium was a great success and very well attended, with high levels of participation from the audience. Interestingly, both the new president of the Ecological Society of Argentina (ASAE), and the president of the Ecological Society of Chile (SOCECOL) were also present and showed interest in the work of INNGE and in potential ways to collaborate more actively. In the case of the Ecological Society of Argentina this interest was actually started previous to the meeting, when the recently elected board invited early career researchers to actively participate as part of the governing board, with the aim of making early career ecologists more connected and well represented by their ecological society.
After the symposium, many attendees showed interest in being involved and collaborating with other INNGE activities across South America. At present, a group of more than 40 young researchers are actively participating together and with their Ecological Society, putting together several ideas and discussions of collaboration, evaluation of the actual situation and future goals of early career ecologists. The challenge is now to keep this momentum and further enhance regional integration across South America. It was a really great first step for early career science in the Western South, and we are optimistic that a lot more steps like this are coming!
Reported by Georgina Conti, Laureano Gherardi (Rep), Sofía Campana and Florencia Spirito (Rep) from ASAE
INNGE Events and Networking Opportunities at Upcoming Conferences
Our team will be available for networking in this year’s conferences and we are planning activities ourselves at some selected conferences. If you are planning to attend some of the meetings listed below and interested in networking or supporting our events, write to our INNGE contact points (listed below). Also make sure you are already following our Facebook and Twitter (@INNGEcologist) accounts and subscribed to our mailing list for regular updates on our events.
Our conference calendar is also filled with events from over the world. If you would like to subscribe, click here.
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9-13 Jan 2017: 8th Biennial Conference of the International Biogeography Society, Tucson, USA - INNGE contact point Marten Winter
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16-20 Feb 2017: Annual Meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Boston, USA - INNGE contact point Angee Doerr
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14-18 Mar 2017: 64th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Japan, Tokyo Japan - INNGE contact point Nalaka Geekiyanage
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19-21 Apr 2017: 10th Annual Meeting of the Specialist Group on Macroecology of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Vienna, Austria. - INNGE Contact Point Marten Winter
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7-11 May 2017: Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution Meeting, Victoria, British Columbia. - INNGE Contact Point Mélanie Jean
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6-11 Aug 2017 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, USA - INNGE contact points Laureano Gherardi and Naupaka Zimmerman.
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20-25 Aug 2017 12th Quadrennial Meeting of INTECOL, Beijing, China - INNGE contact points Alice Hughes,Julia Clause and Peter Søgaard Jørgensen
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11-14 Dec 2017: GFÖ, NecoV and EEF Annual Meeting 2017, Ghent, Belgium - INNGE contact points Julia Clause
Stay in touch with INNGE
Thank you for reading our newsletter. If you like to receive upcoming editions, do not forget to subscribe here. You can read past editions of the newsletter here. The next edition of the newsletter will be distributed in later this Spring.
By Nalaka Geekiyanage: Editor (INNGE Newsletter)
