The German, Austrian & Swiss Ecological Society
(GfÖ) is meeting jointly with the German Society
for Limnology (DGL) this week in Potsdam,
Germany. The guiding theme of the 43rd Annual
Meeting is "Building bridges in ecology - linking
systems, scales and disciplines". There are about
a thousand people here for the meeting, at the
University of Potsdam, with a large proportion of
students. About 8 years ago the Society decided
to hold all of its presentations in English, so
the meeting is quite accessible to English
speakers (although some of the posters are in
German). One consequence of that decision was
that much of the "nature protection" component of
the membership (by which I think they mean most
of the management-focused members), which isn't
as fluent with English as the academic component,
stopped coming to the annual meeting.
There are least three American members of the
Ecological Society of America in attendance, one
of whom (Nelson Hairston, Jr.) was one of the
plenary speakers. One evening event was a joint
session on the policy-science interface with
members of the Japan Ecological Society and the
GfÖ. Another is Chris Swan, who will be local
host for the ESA's 2015 100th anniversary meeting
in Baltimore (maybe he'll adopt the practice here
of providing free beer at the evening
reception!). There are also a significant number
of British Ecological Society members in
attendance, and other plenary speakers are from
Belgium, UK, Spain, Netherlands, and Sweden.
If you're interested in learning what are current
topics of research in the German-speaking world,
you can access the program and abstracts (in
English) at http://www.gfoe-2013.de/ (the Program tab).
David Inouye
