ESA-INTECOL Meeting at Montreal, Part 2

This is the second part of the ESA-INTECOL series... and very much delayed

Monday August 8
First day of the conference and I woke up nice and early to hunt for some breakfast, again heading towards Rue de St. Catherine since that's the only area I knew for sure of food that was fairly cheap. I went to the Palais and went to a number of talks before realizing that I was falling asleep in the middle of some particularly bad ones. Not much to write about besides the large number of talks involving ecosystem function, carbon cycling, and advanced statistical methods. Then I had lunch at the Tim Horton's (a restaurant chain specializing in sandwiches and donuts) underneath the Palais, then I met up with the rest of my lab-mates to attend my lab's post-doc's talk. Strangely enough, though, it's been placed in the "Population and Movement Modelling" section and his talk is monitoring ecosystem function using remote sensing. Afterwards, there's a large migration of VCSARS lab people to the urban and riparian ecosystems session, where Suzanne, heanother of my labmates is giving a talk. She's nervous and panicked since she only finished prepping for her presentation, but in the end, her presentation comes across as organized and professional. That evening, I go out to dinner with my adviser, the post-doc, and this other guy in my lab and I end up getting ass-drunk from wine and Brazilian coffee. I get back to my room and decide to watch my drinking habits.

Tuesday, August 9
It's the day I preside over the session on arctic and boreal nutrient cycling. I was so nervous that I actually had trouble eating, although in the end, the post-doc convinces me to eat a really good bowl of pho. Strengthened, I preside over the session with hardly any glitches and I meet a post-doc from University of Florida who's working on a really cool project with carbon dynamics in the arctic. I drooled over the project and exchanged contact information. Hopefully I can get in on this project, if not one of the many I'm drooling over at Oregon State University or Stanford. That night, after a long presiding session in the afternoon and hanging out at my friend's poster, the students (minus the adviser) go out to dinner in some up-scale Mexican cafe in the French part.

Wednesday, August 10
That pretty much described my experience with trying to get my poster up since I'm really short and the poster boards were up pretty high. I ended up getting stuff up with the help of a statistics professor from Spain who had the same problem as I did about 5 minutes before I arrived. Together, we got my poster up :) It was a fairly uneventful day and during my poster presentation, I had many visitors who generally poked and prodded at my poster. There were a few visitors that really stood out, including a grad student from UC Berkeley who I had talked to many times at past conferences, the post-doc from University of Florida, and a grad student from somewhere in Korea who also was someone I kept seeing at other conferences. I definitely think University of Florida is a strong possibility, crappy location aside (deepest apologies to my friends who live out there... but this little one is a product of the Pacific Northwest!). I blank out on the rest of that evening -- I do remember going out to dinner with my adviser and two other students at this fancy vegetarian buffet and getting ass-drunk (again!) on beer, vodka, and what they call "Irish coffee".

Thursday, August 11
I woke up with a pretty massive case of nausea and a headache. After puttering around trying to deal with the hangover, I ended up just wandering around town since I didn't find any talks of interest. Nothing to write home about.

Friday, August 12
My last day at the conference. I pretty much attended all of the morning talks on either stomatal conductance modelling or on carbon and water dyamics in boreal ecosystems. There were many excellent talks that helped convince me that the real fun is going to be in carbon and/or northern ecosystems and I had a nice discussion about different statistical analyses to sort out eddy flux tower data. After sitting through some of the best talks the whole week, I ended up heading back to my room, dumping off my stuff, and then exploring more of Montreal. I plucked up the courage to rent a bike, which by the way, is an excellent way to travel... but only if the seat isn't one of those horribly hard skinny seats on road bikes. Aggravating the problem was the fact that the bike was a bit big for me since I'm very short. Three hours later, I returned the bike and hobbled back to the room, where I packed and relaxed to the best of my ability before heading home.