Centennial lecture series celebrates the past and future of ecology

The 100^th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America

August 9-14, 2015 in Baltimore, Md.
Ecological Science at the Frontier

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, 8 May 2015
Contact: Liza Lester, 202-833-8773 ext. 211, gro.asenull@retseLL

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This August, the Ecological Society of America convenes its 100^th Annual Meeting at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, Md. The centennial meeting is on track to be our largest annual gathering, with over 4,000 presentations of the latest research findings and applications, and the history, policy, and ethics of ecology and conservation science.

The anniversary has inspired sessions celebrating the past and looking forward to future investigations into the relationships of organisms to each other and their environment. The last century has seen the development of the foundations of ecological theory. The discipline continues to expand its boundaries with new ideas, new experimental tools, and the recruitment of young scientists from previously excluded social groups. The Centennial Ecology Lecture Series will supplement our established plenary lectures, inviting further reflection on these themes of history and change.

Centennial Ecology Lecture Series

Climate change: mapping the problem space and the solution space

Chris Field  
New Phytologist Trust Lecture
Monday, Aug. 10, 12:00-1:15 PM room 308

ESA is excited to welcome the New Phytologist Trust, a not-for-profit dedicated to the promotion of plant science, as a sponsor of this lecture. Chris Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University, and faculty director of Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. His research emphasizes impacts of climate change, from the molecular to the global scale, integrating field, laboratory, and modeling approaches.

Together or not at all: the collective power of ecology and natural history in the Anthropocene

Joshua Tewksbury
Tuesday, Aug. 11, 12:00-1:15 PM room 310

Ever since he found out there was a formal discipline that sought to explain the diversity of the world, Josh Tewksbury has been working as an ecologist, naturalist, and conservation scientist, continually caught between the desire to save and savor the natural world. He is the founding director of the Luc Hoffmann Institute, a boundary science organization at WWF that brings together biophysical science, social science, and policy and practice experts, and the Doug and Maggie Walker Professor of Natural History at the University of Washington.

Untangling the population dynamic interactions between climate and infectious diseases

Mercedes Pascual
Robert H. MacArthur Award Lecture
Wednesday, Aug. 12, 12:00-1:15 PM room 310

Mercedes Pascual takes a contemporary epidemiological perspective on a long running historical debate in ecology: the role of extrinsic (environmental) vs. intrinsic (density-dependent) factors in population dynamics. She will present a synthesis of her research group’s findings on climate variability and climate change and their interaction with the population dynamics of infectious diseases, specifically cholera in Bangladesh and malaria in Africa and India. Pascual is a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, and on the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.

The Robert H. MacArthur Award is given biannually to an established ecologist in midcareer for meritorious contributions to ecology in the expectation of continued outstanding ecological research.

A preliminary version of the full conference program, including abstracts, will be available in June 2015.

Meeting abstracts are not embargoed. Reporters who would like help locating presenters and outside sources for in person or phone interviews should contact Liza Lester at gro.asenull@retsell or (202) 833-8773 x211.

ESA welcomes attendance from members of the press and waives registration fees for reporters and institutional public information officers. Information about our policy on press credentials and press room support is available on the Centennial Meeting website. To apply, please contact ESA Communications Officer Liza Lester directly at gro.asenull@retsell.

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The Ecological Society of America (ESA), founded in 1915, is the world’s largest community of professional ecologists and a trusted source of ecological knowledge, committed to advancing the understanding of life on Earth. The 10,000 member Society publishes six journals and a membership bulletin and broadly shares ecological information through policy, media outreach, and education initiatives. The Society’s Annual Meeting attracts 4,000 attendees and features the most recent advances in ecological science. Visit the ESA website at https://ecologicalsocietyofamerica.org.