ESA kicks of 94th annual meeting in Albuquerque: let's party!

Many of the best minds in ecology have traveled to Albuquerque. The Ecological Society of America has kicked off their 94th Annual Meeting. This year's theme is "Ecological Knowledge and the Global Sustainable Society," and many of the presentations focus on the relationship between ecology and the urban environment. The conference started last night and runs until August 7.

As I type this, 3500 ecological researchers, professionals, educators, and students are living it up at the Albuquerque Convention Center. Unfortunately, Conservation Maven couldn't make it this year. We already spent our annual travel budget to go to a wedding (next year, however, we plan on attending and live-blogging from the conference). But for now we will be posting periodic updates of some of the conference highlights.

The conference started off Sunday with the presentation of the 2nd annual ESA Regional Policy Award to New Mexico Senator Tom Udall. Senator Udall serves on two sub-committees relevant to the work of ESA - the subcommittee on Science and Space and the Subcommittee on Water and Wildlife. The Senator has a lifetime environmental voting record of 95 percent according to the LCV scale and according to ESA received this award because of his efforts to return bipartisanship to science policy making.

Today's schedule runs from 7:00am until 10:00pm and includes almost 100 different activities. The choices are difficult. From 10:15 am - 11:30 am, do you go to the Improv Comedy Session or do you go to Warfare Ecology: Agenda for an Emerging Sub-Field? Decisions, decisions.