Graduate Student Symposium

Working Group Reports

Final reports: 

GSS_resport_2012.pdf

Past graduate student symposiums have led to productive interactions between graduate students through career panel discussions, graduate student presentations on cross site work, and student-led and -organized working groups. The working groups in particular provide the opportunity to network with other graduate students who are interested in similar topics but may be affiliated with different LTER sites. A number of past working groups have produced manuscripts and resulted in important publications. We hope to continue the success of past symposiums at the upcoming ASM.

The theme of the 2012 Graduate Student Symposium will be "Thinking outside the ecological box: Incorporating additional disciplines in ecological research." We will address this theme in four ways:

1. A plenary talk by a distinguished LTER scientist who has incorporated a social element into his or her long term research
2. A panel of ecologists involved in cross-discipline collaborations within the LTER network
3. Presentations by graduate students who have successfully incorporated other sciences into their own research within the LTER network
4. A graduate student led working group examining how graduate students can incorporate additional sciences into their own research within the LTER network

Draft Agenda:

Saturday, September 8^th

• graduate student travel day
• evening -- graduate student mixer

Sunday, September 9^th

• 8:30-8:40 Welcome (Kim La Pierre and Sally Koerner)
• 8:40-9:00 Brief introduction to the LTER/LNO (Dr. Bob Waide)
• 9:00-10:00 Plenary talk on integrating social sciences into ecological research within the LTER network (Dr. Nancy Grimm)
• 10:00-10:30 coffee break
• 10:30-11:30 three 20-minute talks by graduate students who do cross-discipline ecological research within the LTER network (Sakura Evans, Sarah Frey Hadley)
• 11:30-12:30 panel of LTER investigators who incorporate additional disciplines into LTER research (Dr. Sandra Henderson, Dr. Dave Gutzler, Dr. Trina McMahon, Dr. Nancy Grimm)
• 12:30-1:30 lunch
• 1:30-3:30 graduate student led working group session A (concurrent sessions)
• 3:30-5:30 graduate student led working group session B (concurrent sessions)

Graduate student working groups will be either 2 hours in length (fitting within one of the two sessions) or four hours in length (extending over both sessions A and B).

Working group lengths will be determined by the working group organizers and stated in their proposals. We envision working groups which are based on discussing methods/techniques or general ecological patterns across sites/disciplines may be 2 hours in length, while those which will come to ASM with a dataset to be analyzed may be 4 hours in length.

By splitting the working groups into two sessions, graduate students will have the opportunity to attend several sessions which interest them, rather than having to choose one or the other.