In December the British Ecological Society held their annual meeting in Liverpool (UK), which was attended by over 1200 delegates and over 1000 presentations and posters. ECONOVO was represented by four postdoctoral researchers, in the form of Joe Atkinson, Matt Kerr, Camille Magneville and Sean Pang.
On Wednesday, Joe presented his work on global C3/C4 dynamics in the Community Ecology session, with Sean and Matt presenting back-to-back in the Macroecology (Global Change) session later in the day. Sean covered disequilibrium in species distributions and Matt presented his research on global exposure to novel conditions. Camille presented on the Friday, showcasing her work on drivers of functional and phylogenetic diversity in Mediterranean forests in the Macroecology (Distributions) session.
During lunch sessions, there were several workshops running - our postdoc team went to learn more about ECR grant writing, scenarios development and acoustic indices.
As one of the largest ecology conferences, there were plenty of chances for networking and catching up with old and new colleagues from all over the world. The BES Macroecology special interest group had their yearly social, jointly with the conservation group, held as a pub quiz (which unfortunately we did not win).
Sean organised a tropical ecology meet-up, which brought together researchers working across all 3 tropics, and Matt organised the BeerEcology meetup for the second year running, which saw 40 ecologists from all disciplines and career stages meet-up to chat socially and share their love of good, local beer.
