Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting

Abstract

Since 2008 the Netherlands Ecological Research Network (NERN) organises her annual conference, the Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting (NAEM) on the second Tuesday and Wednesday of February. This conference is particularly geared towards people working in the field of ecology and/or evolution. It aims to strengthen and profile Dutch ecological research in an (inter)national context to accordingly strengthen the ecological network.

Normally, the NAEM meeting is two full days, each day consisting of a plenary session, in which a Dutch/Flemish and an international world leader present their view on a specific topic in ecology or evolution, two sets of five parallel sessions (including more workshop-like sessions), and a poster session. Parallel sessions generally consists of 6 oral presentations, thus leading to a total of approximately 125 oral presentations. On average, we have about 75-100 scientific poster presentations during the meeting. On Tuesday evening, a more relaxed and thought-provoking presentation is generally scheduled.

In 2021, however, the NAEM meeting was organised in a somewhat different form, due to the Covid-19 outbreak. After consultation with the NERN community, the NERN Board, and the NAEM organising committee, we decided to offer an online event across the two days in February. This event provided a space for young(er) scientists to present their work to peers and aimed at providing a networking opportunity for ecologists around. Rather than going for long, exhausting online lectures, we decided to develop a format of thematic sessions consisting of short junior scientist talks with "a head and a tail", and separate poster pitch sessions. The meeting was very well attended with over 700 people registering for the meeting. The maximum number of people present in the meeting at a given time sat somewhere between 370 and 380 on Tuesday and between 320 and 330 on Wednesday.