IAGLR18IAGLR18

Call for Sessions

Deadline: Friday, November 10


We invite you to propose a scientific session for IAGLR's 61st Annual Conference on Great Lakes Research, to be held June18–22, at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

In keeping with the conference theme Great Science for Tomorrow’s Solutions, we welcome sessions that introduce new perspectives or solutions to recognized and emerging research and management issues related to the Great Lakes and other large lakes worldwide. Past topics include the following:

  • Beach health: pathogens, HABs, and NABs
  • Benthic-pelagic coupling
  • Benthic recovery and resiliency
  • Biomonitoring and data sharing networks
  • Citizen science and freshwater stewardship
  • Coupled physical and biogeochemical processes in large lakes
  • Changes in ecosystem services (fishing, beach use, drinking water)
  • Ecological informatics and machine learning techniques
  • Ecosystem modeling and uncertainty analysis
  • Economic aspects of ecosystem changes
  • Ecosystem resiliency, restoration & recovery
  • Emerging contaminants
  • Environmental acoustic telemetry, and submersible technologies
  • Fate and transport of nutrients from the watershed to large Lakes
  • Food webs dynamics
  • Genomics and emerging technology in the Great Lakes
  • Ground water–surface water interaction
  • Hydrology and hydrodynamics in large lakes
  • Invasive species
  • Links within and among fish, invertebrate, and wildlife ecology
  • Littoral–limnetic coupling
  • Paleolimnology
  • Physical–ecological interactions in inland waters
  • Present and future impact of climate change
  • Remote technology and big data
  • Risk assessment and policy analysis
  • Science education, policy, and outreach

Session Chair Responsibilities

Once the sessions are established, session chairs are asked to solicit at least 6-8 abstracts to help form the session. Sessions are most successful when the chair or co-chairs recruit interested speakers well in advance of the abstract submission deadline in January.

All contributors must submit an abstract through the IAGLR website once the Call for Abstracts is available in November. Session chairs will monitor the abstracts being submitted to their session and work with the authors to edit or modify as needed. If fewer than 5 presentations are received for a given session, the conference program chairs will consult with the session chair either to combine the submitted abstracts with another session or create a new session title with similar abstracts submitted to other sessions. When all abstracts are assigned to a session, the session chairs will determine the order of presentation within their session. 

During the conference, it is the duty of the chairs to ensure that the session runs precisely on the time scheduled for each talk. This is necessary for both the presenters and the audience.

At the conference, session chairs are expected to:

  • introduce the session
  • introduce each presenter
  • manage the time to ensure each presentation is on time (20-minute time slots must be adhered to)
  • facilitate the question and answer periods within the final 5 minutes of the time slot

All speakers including session organizers must pay registration fees.

Questions?

If you have any questions about chairing a session, please contact the local planning leads:

To Propose a Session

Submit your idea online. You'll be asked to provide the following information:

  • short session title
  • brief description (2-3 sentences) of the session focus
  • estimated number of contributors
  • names and contact information for the session chair or co-chairs (please limit co-chairs to no more than 4)

Submission via the website is required for all potential session organizers.

If you are interested in arranging a session that includes a panel discussion, please contact the conference program chair after submitting your proposal. This type of session must be approved ahead of time.

Download the Call for Sessions and share with your network.

Chair Notification

Chairs will be notified in November regarding acceptance of their session. Chairs of confirmed sessions will also receive further instructions at that time. The Call for Abstracts will follow.