BES Macro Cardiff conference, July 2024

• Dates for the main conference: Thursday 11th - Friday 12th July 2024. We will start at 10:00 on Thursday and finish by 17:00 on Friday.
• Date for the ECR Day: Weds 10th July, 11:00 start.
• Location: Sir Martin Evans Building, University of Cardiff, Wales, UK.
• Local host lead: Dr Tom Rhys Bishop.
• Organising committee led by SIG Chair, Joseph Bailey.
• At the conference, expect: two workshops, a poster session, short and long talks, three plenaries, a photograph competition, and vegetarian lunch and refreshments (other dietary requirements will be accommodated).
• At the ECR day, expect: food and refreshments, networking opportunities, discussion and activities around issues ECRs face in science and academia, and solutions for tackling them.
• If you have any queries, please email [email protected].
• In-person conference registration deadline: Friday 31st May, 17:00.
• Student plenary conference registration and submission deadline: Friday 3rd May, 17:00.
• Online registration deadline: 28th June 2024, 17:00.
• Note that all timings associated with this meeting use British Summer Time, which is UTC + 1.

The British Ecological Society has special interest groups. The Macro group’s members are interested in the strengths and limitations of integrating concepts, questions and data across taxonomic, spatial and temporal scales, and the links among the disciplines of macroecology, macroevolution, palaeontology, conservation and others. Learn more at https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/membership-community/special-interest-groups/macroecology/.

We aim to be highly inclusive and welcoming (see BES webpage): anyone of any career stage who is interested in generalisable ecological and/or evolutionary patterns over broad spatial and/or temporal and/or taxonomic scales should attend!

Attendance at this workshop is sold as a separate ticket type within this event listing, for a nominal additional cost: be sure to select the separate ticket type when registering. The extra cost goes towards the refreshments.

The in-person ECR Day will run the day before the main conference (so, on Wed. 10th July), focusing on networking opportunities, discussion and activities around issues early-career students and researchers face in science and academia (e.g. around publishing, funding), and solutions for tackling them.

For purposes of this event, people should self-identify as an ECR because there are several definitions, and we are flexible. Generally an ECR is considered to be: current PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and anyone else within ~5 years of completing their PhD.

We would also like to invite non-ECR BES Macro members from various career stages to attend this day in a mentoring capacity. If you would like to volunteer for this, you will see an option to do so when registering. Note that we may have a small budget to put towards some mentors’ travel/accommodation if that would be needed to facilitate your attendance (do get in touch if so: [email protected]).

If you attended our Sheffield meeting in 2022 or our Birmingham meeting in 2023, you can expect a similar format, with a few tweaks to make things simpler for presenters. We strongly encourage in-person attendance, but to broaden our reach across our entire membership in an environmentally-friendly manner, we will again offer online attendance this year, including a reduced fee for lower income countries. We plan to stream and record all talks and to make posters available electronically, though some of the other activities will be in-person only. There will once again be a Slack workspace to facilitate communication between in-person and remote attendees.

At the end of the first day of the conference on Thursday 11th (i.e. after the poster session), there will be an evening social and networking outing, hopefully going to a nearby Cardiff park (weather-dependent). Please note that your registration does not include an evening meal, but there will be opportunities to purchase food during this social.

We invite attendees to apply to present short talks (5 minutes + questions), long talks (10 minutes + questions), and posters; preferred presentation format is noted as part of the registration process and ticket purchase. PhD students should also consider applying for the competitive student plenary (more info below).

You can apply for a lightning 5-minute talk or a longer 10-minute talk, both of which are followed by approximately two minutes for questions. All talks will be streamed and recorded for the benefit of online attendees. Information for online attendees is below.

(N.B. if you attended BES Macro as a speaker in the past two years, you may remember that we required you to pre-record and upload your talk; we have removed that requirement for in-person presenters this year; see below for online attendees.)

Posters will need to be available in print and as PDFs. The in-print format should be A1 or smaller (any orientation). Feel free to tessellate a couple of A3 sheets if that’s easier/cheaper for you! We’re fairly easy-going with this: as long as it gets your message across, it’s the content and conversations that matter for BES Macro! Email posters to conference organisers ([email protected]) at least one week before the event, so they can all be made available to online attendees.

As a bit of fun, we want to see some wonderfully macro (in all senses of the word) photographs this year that can be available for all to view throughout the two days. If you want to get involved, please bring an A4 or, ideally, A3 print-out of your photograph and we’ll have a friendly competition for who has taken the best photo! There may or may not be a prize.

The student plenary is a staple of BES Macro! Any student in (or nearly in) the final year of their PhD, or who has completed in the past year, should apply for this prestigious talk as part of the registration process. It provides an extended platform for you to share your work with the BES Macro network, so please apply! And, supervisors, please encourage your students to apply.

The talk will be 30 minutes long plus a 15-minute Q & A, and unlike for short and long talks, we require a title and abstract (max 250 words) from student plenary applicants. These will be reviewed anonymously by the organising committee to choose the winner. We hope that any unsuccessful applicants will still attend the meeting and present their research as short talks or posters, but if not, we would give a full refund on request.

We will be able to offer financial support of up to £500 + free registration to the student plenary speaker to cover costs and/or travel. We require student plenary applications by Friday 3rd May, 17:00, to allow for sufficient time to process applications, contact the applicants (expect to hear from us within 3 weeks), and make arrangements. We also encourage international students to apply, but note that we will not be able to assist with visa applications except by providing a letter confirming the position of student plenary at the conference.

Those attending online will be able to access the full range of talks via the live stream and/or subsequent recordings, and be able to engage with other participants via Slack. Posters will be available to all attendees via Google Drive.

If you are attending online, you can apply for a poster or a short or long talk, which, if accepted, will be available virtually. Our requirement is that the talk must be pre-recorded and provided to conference organisers at least one week before the event (email a sharing link or file to [email protected]). The Q & A will take place via Slack. While some pre-recorded virtual talks may be shown as part of the in-person conference timetable, we cannot guarantee that all will because the conference is primarily face-to-face.

We strive for our events to be as accessible as possible. The conference venue is fully wheelchair accessible, and if you require other information to ensure that this conference is accessible to you, please do not hesitate to contact us ([email protected]).

More details will be added here soon so watch this space, but we promise that there will be two high quality workshops, each lasting 1-2 hours. One of these will focus on science communication. We do not currently have plans to stream or record the workshops, but this will be confirmed at a later date.

We have two incredible plenary speakers lined up, to be later joined by the student plenary! They will each speak for 45-minutes, with a Q & A to follow.

Reader in Conservation Ecology, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park), Imperial College London, UK. http://cale-lab.com/

How much habitat is enough?

Leaders from 196 nations committed at COP15 to protect 30% of the surface of the earth for nature conservation by 2030. But will this be enough? Or is it too much? In this presentation, I will talk about ecological thresholds as a way to estimate the minimum amount of habitat required to preserve biodiversity, and how the position of thresholds changes across biomes world-wide. I will show how this local scale response of biodiversity to habitat changes is driven by macroecological processes occurring at regional and global levels. I will argue it is high time we stop pretending a one-size-fits-all solution will solve global environmental issues, and instead we should embrace ecological complexity to develop environmental policies that work for people and nature alike.

Reader, School of Biosciences, Cardiff University, Wales, UK.

Title and abstract will be available soon, but you can read about Sarah’s work at https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/perkinss.

Our thanks to the event’s journal sponsors (Journal of Animal Ecology and Methods in Ecology and Evolution), the host team at University of Cardiff, and our plenary speakers.

We recommend that you book your accommodation in good time.

We will be using the Sir Martin Evans Building at Cardiff University.

Recommended areas to stay are Roath (15-20 mins), Cathays (10-15 mins), City Centre (10-15 mins), Pontcanna (15-20 mins) or Canton (20-30 mins). All are walkable to the University Cathays campus (times in brackets). Not much travel distance between all of these!

Further, Cathays train station is 3 minutes walk to the building which is on the Merthyr/Treherbert train lines (and connects to Cardiff central, obviously). Buses from North Cardiff are frequent: the 21/23/24/25 bus routes would be the ones to look out for if staying in the Cardiff suburbs. Plenty of taxis available from Cardiff Central train station to the various suburbs and areas. Walk from Cardiff Central (which is the opposite end of the centre to most hotels and the University) to the Sir Martin Evans Building is 30 minutes.

Ticket types are summarised below, along with key information due to a character restriction for the actual ticket names when purchasing. The numerical system should make this easy to communciate if someone is purchasing the ticket on your behalf.

In the ticket selection, you will see the usual combinations of online, student, non-student, BES member, and non-member, as well as an option to sign up to the ECR Day, so please read through the large list of options carefully, then choose the correct ticket number at time of booking. For potential mentors, there is an option for you to volunteer for that as part of the ticket purchase, so please consider doing so.

Your ticket will get you access to networking opportunities and a fantastic range of talks and posters. In-person attendees will also be able to attend two workshops, enter the photography competition, get vegetarian and vegan lunches, and have soft and alcoholic drinks at the poster session. Anyone attending in person will also get access to all online resources.

Depending on the number of people applying for short vs long talks vs posters, we may need to adjust your selection, but we will try to give everyone their preference. If there is a requirement for you to give a talk over a poster (e.g. from your funder), there is an option for you to state this.

The ticket numbers and types are as follows:

Ticket #1: Online - 2-day conference (11-12th July)

Ticket #2: Online - Lower income country - 2-day conference (11-12th July)

Ticket #3: In person - BES member - 2-day conference (11-12th July)

Ticket #4: In person - Non-BES member - 2-day conference (11-12th July)

Ticket #5: In person - BES student - 2-day conference (11-12th July)

Ticket #6: In person - Non-BES member student - 2-day conference (11-12th July)

Ticket #7: In person - BES member who is ECR but not a student - 1-day ECR workshop (10th July) + 2-day conference (11-12th July)

Ticket #8: In person - Non-BES member who is ECR but not a student - 1-day ECR workshop (10th July) + 2-day conference (11-12th July)

Ticket #9: In person - BES Student - 1-day ECR workshop (10th July) + 2-day conference (11-12th July)

Ticket #10: In person - Non-BES member student - 1-day ECR workshop (10th July) + 2-day conference (11-12th July)
o Please be aware that in requesting a refund you will be reimbursed the event ticket price, subject to our refund policy, but unfortunately you will not be reimbursed the Eventbrite fee.

o If you are interested in becoming a BES member to purchase the BES member rate ticket, you can find out more information and join here. Membership starts from £24, or you can get 12-months free membership if you are an undergraduate, masters, or first year PhD student.

o To view the British Ecological Society’s privacy policy please click here.

Host or Publisher BES Macro SIG