Hundreds of scientists from dozens of disciplines will gather in Seattle 18-21 September 2003 for “Embarking on a Decade of Synthesis,” the 4th LTER All Scientists Meeting.
This meeting will include a joint session with the annual meeting of the Estuarine Research Federation on 18 September. Following the joint session there will be a joint mixer, and the LTER meeting will continue on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
The choice for an LTER/ERF joint session was an easy one says LTER Network Office executive director and meeting coordinator Bob Waide. There are five coastal LTER sites, and they will most all be attending the ERF meeting. Locating the LTER meeting in Seattle and planning a joint session makes it very interesting for everyone, says Dan Childers, PI of the Florida Coastal Everglades LTER site and chair of the joint-session program commitee.
The other LTER coastal sites include Santa Barbara (Dan Reed, PI), Georgia Coastal (Tim Hollibaugh and Steve Pennings, PIs), Virginia Coast Reserve (Bruce Hayden, Karen McGlathery, and John Porter, PIs), and Plum Island Ecosystems (Chuck Hopkinson, PI).
The goal of the joint session, titled “Long-term and large-scale patterns in coastal and freshwater aquatic ecosystems,” is to bring coastal and estuarine scientists together with scientists from other LTER sites, to address the common theme of large-scale comparisons, Childers says.
This joint session affords the opportunity for convergence and a stronger understanding of ecosystem science, says Tiffany Troxler-Gann, one of two graduate student representatives on the program commitee. The estuarine and coastal systems are the downstream ecosystems of many LTER research sites, Tiffany says, and this meeting will accentuate how LTER work can be more integrated.
Details as they emerge will be available on the ASM 2003 web site: http://www.lternet.edu/asm/2003