The scientific program included oral presentations and poster presentations. The oral presentations ran from 08:00-17:30 every day from Wednesday, 4 Oct. through Saturday, 7 October. Each day opened with a plenary lecture, followed by selected society awards and announcements, then a refreshment break. The oral presentations ran from 10:00-17:30 each day, with eight parallel concurrent oral sessions, including both symposia and general sessions. There were two poster sessions, Wednesday and Friday, from 19:30-22:00. No other activities were planned during the poster sessions.
The IV NAOC Scientific Program included 24 symposia. All oral papers, whether symposium or contributed, were the same length: 15 minutes including introduction and questions.
With over 1200 submitted abstracts and hundreds of additional participants, the IV NAOC promises to be among the largest ornithological meetings ever held. Building a program that serves all of these participants has not been an easy chore. The Co-chairs of the Scientific Program Committee were chosen by the Steering Committee early in 2005, with both North and Latin American ornithologists involved. Our first official act was to issue a call for proposals for symposia and plenary speakers with a deadline in October 2005. The response to the call for symposia was almost overwhelming, with over 50 proposals that would have included over 650 talks if all were accepted.
We could not accept all of the recommendations unless we accepted no additional talks for the general sessions or had far too many concurrent sessions. As a result, we attempted to combine proposals, where possible. Some symposia were more appropriate for workshops and were scheduled for the days before or after the NAOC. After much communication, we reduced the number of symposia to 24, with 336 total talks. This is still a lot of sponsored symposia, but we felt that the situation of having temperate and tropical biologists together favored a larger than usual number of symposia. At this same time, we were able to choose four excellent plenary speakers who cover both temperate and tropical topics exceedingly well while also taking into account the needs of some of the participating societies.
The general call for papers was released in January 2006, with a deadline in April. With over 850 abstracts submitted in addition to the symposium talks, we had to make some serious decisions about how to proceed. With symposia taking up four concurrent sessions, we decided to limit ourselves to eight concurrent sessions. This has been done before at meetings, and going beyond this number not only would stretch the space available at our meeting site but would increase problems of concurrent sessions with overlapping topics. As a result of this decision, we only had 368 open spaces for oral presentations; the remaining submissions had to be given as poster presentations.
With fewer than 200 applicants who expressed a “poster only” preference, our next decision was to assign to the poster category all applicants who suggested that they did not care if they gave a talk or a poster. Even then, this left us 600 abstracts to be searched to fill 368 speaking positions, with the remainder being assigned to posters. At this point, the other members of the Scientific Program Committee came into action. By dividing up the abstract lists by category and assigning them to members who worked in those areas, committee members started putting together clusters of abstracts on the same topic that made a clearly focused session of talks.
Of course, in nearly all categories we had many more abstracts than we could fit into the speaking program anyway. All of the committee members made suggestions for sessions from their lists, and a couple of us looked at all of the abstracts so that particular topics that were scattered across categories could be clustered together. In an attempt to stay current, we favored a few small sessions that deal with “hot” new topics (reflectance or extra pair paternity), but we also kept some of the old standards (parasitism and mating systems) and divided up space in general proportion to how papers were submitted. Even if our evaluation process was perfect, which we know it is not, in many areas there were far too many submissions for the space available, so many excellent submissions were assigned to posters. We also needed some junior speakers who were up for presentation awards while not discriminating against more senior folks. In addition, if there were not at least 6 abstracts dealing with a topic, that topic would not appear in an oral session. Finally, we attempted to mix North and Latin Americans into all the sessions possible to support the spirit of the IV NAOC.
To strengthen scientific communication, we have organized the poster sessions in such a way that we think they will be much more interactive than usual. Posters will be clustered by topic in the program and during the poster sessions, so you can easily find all of the papers relevant to your favorite topic and interact with the presenter. Poster presenters dealing with a particular topic will be next to one another, which should allow for dialogue between researchers on the same topic during the session without the presenter having to leave his poster! We think this will make this poster presentation more profitable than has often been the case under crowded conditions with posters dealing with a particular topic scattered about. Of course, with over 250 posters nightly during the two poster sessions, such efficiency of movement is more necessary than at a smaller meeting.
There are an incredible number of excellent research projects being presented at the IV NAOC in both oral and poster formats. We look forward to joining you in Veracruz to share and learn about current research during what we hope will be not only one of the largest ornithological meetings ever held in the New World, but also one of the best.
John Faaborg, Co-chair for the Scientific Program Committee
With Co-chairs: Juan Francisco Ornelas and Maria del Coro Arizmendi,
With US Members: Al Dufty, Elizabeth A. Schreiber, George Wallace, Beth Wallace, Peter Lowther, and Steven C. Latta
With Mexican Members: Octavio Rojas, Carlos Lara, Flor Rodríguez, Adolfo G. Navarro S., Alejandro Espinosa de los Monteros, and J. Fernando Villaseñor G.
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