Ecological Society of America 2020 Virtual Meeting

Visit ESA 2020 meeting webpage.

ESA held a totally virtual Annual Meeting this year from August 3–6 in response to the pandemic. The virtual meeting provided an opportunity for you to join colleagues and leaders from across the field for four days of inspiration and community focused on your research and your career as each of us looks ahead to the future.

Like many science fields, the ecological sciences are being flooded by massive and diverse sources of information. For example, remote sensing platforms, automated sensors, observatory networks, molecular techniques, large-scale or replicated experiments, and predictive (simulation) models are generating enormous amounts of data over time and/or across space. Such big and diverse data are opening up new avenues of research and enabling ecologists to address more complex questions and hypotheses that, for example, span multiple scales and disciplines. However, this information deluge also creates challenges in terms of methods available for harnessing the information contained in such data and tools for effectively communicating big data issues and results. The 105th annual meeting encourages contributions that address these issues or that employ novel and integrative approaches to harnessing the data revolution to address pressing issues in ecology.