From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.
The Botany 2021 meeting (July 19-23) was held virtually for the second year in a row. The virtual meeting was once again a great success as the virtual platform enabled nearly 2,000 participants from 63 countries to attend the meeting. The 2020 virtual Botany meeting ran smoothly, and the 2021 conference built off of last year’s success by lowering costs, increasing accessibility, and making available more content on-demand for participants. The low registration fees were great for facilitating access to the conference for undergraduate students and researchers from developing countries, many of whom may not have been able to attend the meeting if it was held on-site. This year, half of the attendees to the conference were students and 10 percent were post-doctoral fellows; the student prices were lowered from last year to optimize accessibility. Botany conference organizers and the participating societies are working together to decide how to include positive aspects of the virtual conference format into future in-person meetings.
Several members of the Botany Department (Richie Hodel, Gabe Johnson, Eric Schuettpelz, Laurence Skog, Alice Tangerini, Warren Wagner, Jun Wen, Ken Wurdack, and Liz Zimmer) participated in the meetings. Additionally, other people associated with the National Museum of Natural History or other Smithsonian research centers participated (Eleinis Avila-Lovera, Rebecca Dikow, Bill DiMichele, Simone Evans, Dalila Lara, Melissa McCormick, Isabella Schrader, Andy Simpson, William Taylor, Mike Trizna, and Eranga Wettewa).
Richie Hodel organized a workshop, “Using deep learning with digitized herbarium specimen image data,” with Rebecca Dikow and Mike Trizna (Smithsonian’s Office of the Chief Information Officer), Pam Soltis (Florida Museum of Natural History), and Erica Krimmel (iDigBio). The workshop took place on Sunday, July 18 before the main conference program began. The workshop helped participants—ranging from undergraduate students to tenured faculty—get over some of the initial hurdles to executing deep learning analyses using digitized herbarium specimen data in their own research. The workshop ran from 9am-5pm EDT and approximately 50 botanists from around the world participated. Some researchers in Asia joined at 9pm their local time and stayed late into the night, and participants in Hawaii rose early to join at 3am local time. The workshop was conducted using Zoom, Slack, GitHub, and Google Colab. In a post-workshop survey, the majority of participants found the virtual format of the workshop to be very effective or extremely effective.
Next year, the Botany 2022 conference will be held in Anchorage, Alaska from July 24-27. Until then, recorded talks from Botany 2021 will be available to watch on-demand for registered participants in the conference.
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