Call for Sessions

We invite you to propose a scientific session for the State of Lake Ontario Conference (SOLO20), to be held October 26–28 in Toronto, Ontario. Hosted by the International Association for Great Lakes Research, the conference will feature two days of concurrent sessions, workshops, field trips, and associated meetings. SOLO20 is the fourth in an annual series of State of Lake conferences aimed at promoting collaborations between the science and policy communities—particularly lake-specific research, management, education, and nonprofit organizations—to broaden the discussion and provide diverse interaction among stakeholders.

All sessions and invited abstracts should focus on Lake Ontario research and programs. For ideas, review the 2019 State of Lake Huron Conference schedule. Examples of previous sessions include the following:

• Citizen science
• Nutrients, watersheds, and TMDLs
• Education and outreach
• Emerging issues
• Food web dynamics
• Invasive species monitoring and management
• Operational forecasting, modeling, and remote sensing
• Water quality and biogeochemistry

The Role of a Session Chair

If your session is accepted, as the session chair your responsibilities are as follows:

• Solicit at least 6 to 8 abstracts to help form the session.
• Work with recruited speakers to ensure that they submit their abstract by the submission deadline in early June.
• NOTE: If fewer than 4 presentations are received for a given session, the conference program chair will consult with the session chair to either 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. 
• At the conference, session chairs are expected to:
  • Introduce each presenter
  • Manage the time to ensure each presentation is on time
  • Facilitate the question and answer period within the final 5 minutes of each time slot

Questions

If you have any questions about chairing a session or workshop, please contact Laura Olech at laura@steppesolutions.com.

The Call for Sessions is for concurrent scientific sessions that will feature presentations from individual contributors. If you are interested in proposing a workshop or an associated meeting, please note we will begin accepting proposals for these separately in mid May.