This was my first time in Kobe, famous for its beef and
cheesecake. Much of the city was rebuilt in the wake of a devastating
earthquake that claimed the lives of more than six thousand people in 1995. The
city mascot is Kobear (コーベア), a pun almost as clever as the bear is cute. The
conference centre was a vertical maze of meeting rooms and halls, with signs in
Japanese and an army of concierges attempting to funnel us towards our venue of
choice.
I had met Dr. Maria Dornelas at the entrance hall on day one and introduced her to Yuka Suzuki. I’ve known Yuka for a couple of years at this point, but we had never worked on anything together until this conference. Yuka and I had been chosen to organise a symposium at the Ecological Society of Japan’s 2019 annual meeting (ESJ 66), an honour not often given to such early career researchers. The ESJ meetings do not have plenary speakers, meaning that the few invited speakers that headline organised symposia act as the big draw. So, the pressure was on for us to deliver a symposium that people would find interesting and inspiring.
Read the full post on Sam’s blog, The Infrequent Musings of an Early-Career Ecologist!
Or read his award-winning paper here:
Ross SRP-J, Friedman NR, Dudley KL, Yoshimura M, Yoshida T, Economo EP. (2018). Listening to ecosystems: data rich acoustic monitoring through landscape-scale sensor networks. Ecological Research 33(1), 135-147. DOI: 10.1007/s11284-017-1509-5
