Ecological Society of America

Call for Contributed Oral and Poster Abstracts

93^rd ESA Annual Meeting
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
August 3 - 8, 2008
Call Open: December 17, 2007 - February 28, 2008

We invite submission of abstracts for contributed oral and poster presentations at the 2008 ESA Annual Meeting. The meeting will be held August 3-8, 2008, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the Midwest Airlines Center.

Abstracts that address the meeting theme, “Enhancing Ecological Thought by Linking Research and Education”, are especially encouraged, but submissions may address any aspect of ecology and its applications. We also welcome submissions reporting interdisciplinary work, that address communication with broad audiences, or that explore ways of teaching ecology at any level. Please adhere to the following guidelines in preparing and submitting your abstract.

Please note that invited speakers for Symposia and Organized Oral Sessions should not submit their abstracts until they receive specific instructions by email in late January. These abstracts will still be due on February 28, 2008.

A. One Presentation Rule

B. Guidelines for All Oral Presentations

C. Poster Presentations

D. Evaluation and Acceptance of Abstracts

E. Abstract Submission

F. Corrections

G. Cancellations

H. Penalties and Fees for Cancellations/No-Shows

I. Begin Submission Process

A. One Presentation Rule

• To encourage broad participation, each person is allowed to present only one contributed oral, poster, symposium, or organized oral session presentation.

• A person may be a co-author on several abstracts.

• Authors or presenters may also serve as session presiders or as organizers of symposia, organized oral sessions, workshops, or special sessions.

• Exception: An author may submit an abstract for a second presentation ONLY if the second abstract is directly related to ecology education or scientific outreach.  Please contact Program Assistant Aleta Wiley if you have questions about an abstract fitting these criteria.

B. Guidelines for All Oral Presentations

• Speakers for contributed oral presentations are allowed 15 minutes for presentations.

• A 5 minute period between talks allows for questions, discussion, and introduction of the next speaker. This 5 minute period belongs to the audience, not to the speaker, and is managed by the session presider. Time limits will be strictly enforced by session presiders.

• Contributed oral papers may be placed, by the Program Chair, in Organized Oral Sessions if they support the theme of that session. Submitters of contributed papers may indicate a preference for a particular OOS. A list of OOS titles will be available early in 2008; individuals who submit contributed papers before then may revisit this site by early February, and add a preference.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION CONCERNING ORAL PRESENTATIONS:

• Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 are the only acceptable audiovisual formats for electronic presentation for oral papers. Overhead or slide projectors will be available ONLY upon special request by June 15, 2008 to Michelle Horton.

• Each meeting room will be equipped with a dedicated LCD projector and PC laptop configured with DVD/CDRW combo roms, 3 USB ports and will be running Windows XP Pro with MS Office XP Suite and Adobe Acrobat 6.0. It is your responsibility to make sure that your presentation will run under this system. Newer versions of PowerPoint files may not work – save your files in a format compatible with MS Office 2000 for Windows 2000, or with Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 or 9!

• Corel presentations are NOT supported. Embedded animation or graphics are NOT supported. MAC format is NOT supported. However, if you bring your own VGA dongle, you may connect your MAC to the LCD projector. ESA will not provide these adapters. 

• Please do NOT bring your own laptop for your presentation.  

• All presenters will be expected to contact their session presider or projectionist at least 20 minutes in advance of the start of their session to pre-load their presentations onto the dedicated laptop.

• Acceptable media: CDs, Flash drives. You will need to ensure that these are compatible with our laptops – which will have CD readers and USB 2 ports.

C. Poster Presentations

• Posters are encouraged as they allow extended informal discussions and active participation by authors and coauthors. Posters are displayed for a full day, and interested persons can view the poster even when the author is not in attendance.

• Late-afternoon poster sessions provide an opportunity for discussion in a relaxed setting after completion of oral sessions. Presenting authors are required to be present for this scheduled 1½ hour period when their poster is being displayed.

• Poster boards are approximately 2.4 m wide x 1.2 m tall (8 x 4 feet) and there will be 1 poster per poster board.  A poster does not have to take up the maximum amount of space provided.  Since these dimensions are not precise, presenters should design posters to be at least 5 cm (2 inches) smaller on each margin.  Pushpins will be supplied, and are the only method for attaching the poster to the board.

• Poster presenters may not use audio-visual equipment but are welcome to bring along handouts associated with their presentation.

D. Evaluation and Acceptance of Abstracts

• Accuracy of the abstract is the responsibility of the author(s). Abstracts will be rejected if they do not comply precisely with the guidelines on content and format listed here and on the submission website.

• Abstracts must be based primarily on NEW, unpublished material. Reviews of past work are generally not permissible outside of symposia or other special sessions.

• Abstracts may be submitted before all analyses and conclusions are in their final form, but authors MUST report at least preliminary results. Abstracts based primarily on future work will be REJECTED. Vague statements such as “results will be discussed” will result in abstract rejection.

• Abstracts must use standard English, and follow English syntax, grammar, and punctuation rules. Poorly written abstracts will be REJECTED.

E. Abstract Submission

Select the link at the bottom of this page to begin the submission process.  If you have been asked by the organizer of a Symposium or Organized Oral Session to speak in her/his session, please wait until you receive specific instructions by email in late January before submitting your abstract.

Indicating Preferences for Session Assignment:

• Contributed oral or poster presentations will be grouped with others to form sessions.  We attempt to make sessions thematically coherent, and we invite you to indicate your preferences among likely session themes.

• We have listed likely session themes, based on submissions and sessions from prior meetings, in ‘pull-down’ lists under five categories: 1) ecological concepts and processes; 2) ecosystem or habitat; 3) ecological applications, tools, and techniques; 4) subdiscipline; and 5) taxonomic or functional group. 

• Please choose THREE of these themes, in order of your preference, to guide our grouping of papers into sessions.  Each of your preferred themes may be selected from any of the 5 categories. You may, for any of the 3 choices, elect to enter a theme not on the lists provided; to do so, check the ‘other’ box, and enter a brief term in the space provided.  Please use this option only if you are unable to find an appropriate theme in the lists provided.

• PLEASE NOTE that these themes are designed to identify similarities among papers for purposes of grouping, not as keywords for searching the program; highly specific terms (e.g., species names, place-names, particular techniques, etc.) are generally not useful here.  Program users can search the full text of your title and abstract.

• If a theme is selected by many people, we will divide papers among more focused sessions using your next preferences and information in your title and abstract.  If your first preference is not selected frequently enough to populate a full session, we will either group it with talks on related themes or use your second or third preferences, taking into consideration the general category from which your preferences are drawn.

Submitting Abstract and Author Information:

Follow the on-line instructions to submit your abstract.  Follow these general guidelines when entering your abstract:

• Abstracts may be no longer than 400 words in total and must include information on both a)Background/Questions/Methods, using up to 200 words and b)Results/Conclusions, using up to 200 words. We encourage each contributor to identify the objective of the study in the first of these, and be explicit about the results of the study in the second of these. Abstracts without explicitly stated results will not be accepted.

• When entering your title, capitalize the first word, proper nouns, and the first word following a colon. The title is limited to 255 characters (about 15 words). Do not type the title in all capital letters. Place a comma before the word "and" in a series. Do not end your title with punctuation.

        Example: Fecal glucorticoids: A non-invasive method for measuring stress in river otters, brown bears, and red deer

• For each author, enter the full first name, the first letter of the middle name, and the full last name.  Do not add punctuation after any of the names. 

• Only the first line of text in an author’s affiliation will appear in the official conference program; this should be the name of your institution.  Do NOT enter department name on the first line of an author’s affiliation.  Do not end a line with any type of punctuation.

• Symbols, special characters, and fonts are available from a pull-down menu of codes on the abstract submission form. Enter them by selecting from this menu.

• Notification of Receipt: You will be notified of receipt electronically using the e-mail address entered on the submission form. If you enter an incorrect address, you will NOT receive notification. Your abstract will be assigned an Abstract Reference Number. PLEASE DO NOT FORGET THIS REFERENCE NUMBER AS IT WILL BE REQUIRED FOR FUTURE COMMUNICATIONS.  You can edit your abstract until the abstract deadline, February 28, 2008. 

• Notification of Acceptance: You will be notified of acceptance or rejection of your abstract via e-mail by April 25, 2008.

If you encounter problems during abstract submission, contact Aleta Wiley.

Note: Due to the limited amount of time and space available for oral sessions, and the anticipated large number of submissions, you may be asked to give a poster presentation instead of an oral presentation.

F. Making Corrections

• You may view your abstract by going to: http://eco.confex.com/eco/2008/cfp.cgi and entering your Abstract ID Number received at the time of submission.

• Edits can be made directly to the abstract until the abstract deadline, February 28, 2008. Edits necessary after February 28 can be made by contacting Aleta Wiley PRIOR to May 15, 2008. NOTE: Edits are NOT possible after May 15, 2008.

• You can also view your session day, time, and room assignment when the schedule has been finalized. We expect this information to be available in June.

G. Cancellations

• Before submitting an abstract, authors should be confident that they will attend the meeting and make the presentation.

• If circumstances prevent attendance for a scheduled presentation, the author should find another person to make the presentation.

• If cancellation is unavoidable, the author should notify Aleta Wiley as soon as possible. 

• The deadline for cancellation without penalty is May 1, 2008.

H. Penalties and Fees for Cancellations/No-Shows

• Late cancellations and failures to give scheduled presentations are disruptive and leave costly gaps in the program that are distracting to all attendees. Therefore, ESA has adopted the following cancellation policy and fee schedule (all values are in US dollars):

• Each person who submits an abstract, whether for an oral paper or a poster, MUST also provide payment information (credit card or check) to ESA. No abstract submission will be accepted for presentation unless this payment information is received by ESA.

• Payment information will be used to process late cancellation/no show fees ONLY if the presenter either: 1) fails to submit written notification of abstract withdrawal to Aleta Wiley prior to the May 1, 2008 cancellation deadline or, 2) fails to show up to present his/her paper or poster and does not arrange for a co-author or other alternate person to present the abstract. All fees will be processed after August 8, 2008.

• $60.00 US Dollars will be charged for late cancellation/no show oral presentations.

• $40.00 US Dollars will be charged for late cancellation/no show poster presentations.

• Presenters who cancel after May 15, 2008 will not be allowed to give a presentation at the 2009 ESA Meeting.

• Presenters who fail to appear for a scheduled presentation and who do not give any prior notice to ESA, will not be allowed to give a presentation at the 2009 and 2010 ESA Meetings.

• Exceptions: Cancellation fees and penalties may be waived if special circumstances apply. Consideration will be case by case by contacting Aleta Wiley.

 I. Begin Submission Process

To begin the submission process, please click here.

For further information consult the ESA meeting web site or contact the Program Chair, Louis Gross, or Program Assistant, Aleta Wiley: