From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.
The Botany 2022 meeting (July 24-27) was held in person in Anchorage, Alaska, with hundreds of attendees also participating virtually. This was the first time the Botany meeting took on a hybrid format, with both in-person and virtual attendees. In total, there were 1,200 registered botanists representing 38 countries and all 50 U.S. states; more than half of the attendees traveled to Alaska to participate in-person. There were some challenges associated with the hybrid meeting format; Covid-19 was spiking before the meeting and unfortunately some botanists that planned to present in person had to cancel their talks at the last minute because of positive Covid tests.
Several members of the Botany Department participated in the meetings either in-person (Richie Hodel, Jun Wen) or virtually (Laurence Skog, Warren Wagner, Liz Zimmer). Additionally, other people associated with the National Museum of Natural History, or other Smithsonian Units participated in-person (Jenna Ekwealor and Andy Simpson) or virtually (Logan Kistler).
A symposium in memory of Vicki Funk, “A Botanist at the Extreme: Honoring the great contributions of Dr. Vicki A. Funk,” was organized by Jennifer Mandel, Mauricio Bonifacino, Erika Moore, Warren Wagner, and Jun Wen. Seven colleagues including Jennifer Ackerfield, Nicola Bergh, Mauricio Bonifacino, Daniel Jones, Matt Knope, Loren Rieseberg, and Warren Wagner gave presentations covering topics of systematics, biogeography, collections, conservation, development, and genomics. The symposium was co-sponsored by Botanical Society of America (BSA) and International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) and was a well-attended event. A special issue honoring Funk resulted from this symposium will be published in International Journal of Plant Sciences.
Jenna Ekwealor (OCIO Data Science Lab postdoctoral fellow) co-organized a symposium, “Stress-tolerant mosses: adaptations to life on the edge, from genes to ecosystems.” Sponsored by the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, the symposium brought together researchers from California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and even Peru! Two speakers presented remotely, and the whole symposium was livestreamed so remote attendees were able to see the live presentations and Q&A sessions. The symposium was organized into three topics: dimensions of diversity in Syntrichia, ecosystem functions of biological soil crusts (biocrusts), and biocrust restoration. The session toured ecosystems in the Mojave Desert, the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin, and, appropriately, the Alaskan tundra.
Richie Hodel co-organized a workshop, “Using deep learning with digitized herbarium specimen image data,” with Pam Soltis (University of Florida), Sundre Winslow (NHRE summer intern at NMNH), Will Weaver (University of Michigan), and Stefano Fochesatto (University of Alaska-Fairbanks). The workshop took place on Sunday, July 24 before the main conference program began. The workshop helped participants—which ranged from undergraduates to tenured faculty—get over some of the initial hurdles to executing deep learning analyses using digitized herbarium specimen data in their own research.
Next year, the Botany 2023 meetings will be held in Boise, Idaho from July 22-26. Until then, recorded talks from Botany 2022 will be available to watch on-demand for registered participants in the conference.
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