Conferences from the inside

by: Drs M. Jane Bunting and Michelle Farrell

Between August 5th and 9th, we were the hosts and organisers for a small conference with associated workshops (small = 35 people on the busiest day).  Organising a conference makes the experience of being at the event quite different - for a start, some days you don't even get close enough to the coffee table at break to grab a biscuit!

The meeting was supported by the Crackles Bequest Project, which pays Michelle's salary at the moment.  The goals of the conference are described here.  We'll write more about the research later as we get final results and work on the papers; this blog post is about the experience of organising a small conference.

The process began in January when we sent out emails checking the availability of our project partners (a wonderful group of people who provided all sorts of support for fieldwork in different parts of Europe, arranging permits, translating, bringing their students and colleagues along to help our team with the actual work, and being enthusiastic about what we are trying to do, which really helps when you're half-way up a mountain in the driving rain or crawling around in a haymeadow in thirty degree heat trying to identify a lot of very small green leaves, which does tend to start you wondering why this ever seemed like a good idea). We then set the dates so that as many of these people as possible could come, and began to plan in earnest.

The 'who can come when' spreadsheet was just the first of many.  We had to work out how much to charge for registration at the meeting, to cover printing abstract volumes and lecture handouts, provide copies of software and pens, and of course the all-important regular infusions of caffeine (and biscuits) to keep everyone alert.  We got quotes for a conference dinner and developed teaching plans for the workshops.  We booked rooms on campus, contacted the local conference bureau to get their help with negotiating some cheap rates with local hotels, and put together an advertisement to send out to the pollen-counting community via various mailing lists.  We even had lists of the lists we needed to make!

Although it felt like we did a lot of planning in advance, and the deadlines for booking to attend the conference and to get the hotel rates were relatively early on the 31st of May (over two months before), the week before the event ended up being manic.  I really should be used to that by now, but it always takes me by surprise.

Michelle demonstrates field methods in a field

We had fun stuff to do, for example sitting down with the menus from the campus catering service and choosing the options for the lunches (why yes, there WAS a chocolate option on the sweet platter every day, and twice it was brownies).  Michelle had a never-ending stream of emails - the pricing policies of the UK's railway system are baffling at the best of times, but trying to help someone travelling from abroad to find the best value ticket makes you question the sanity of the person who came up with it (or maybe they were just feeling particularly misanthropic that day?), and advising people who come from locations with very predictable weather on the possible conditions during the field day ("honestly, it could be pretty much anything, although snow is unlikely") reminds us that our normal is not anyone elses.  Friday afternoon found us settled in the committee room in our building with piles and piles of paper all over the big tables, assembling the handouts for the workshops - I got a bruise on the palm of one hand from banging the hole-puncher (yes, I should have done smaller wodges of paper, but then I'd not have got home before midnight) and Michelle stuck name labels on folders, assembled badges, and cut out individual slips of paper showing the menu choices for the conference dinner (we decided that would be easier than taking the spreadsheet to the venue or hoping people would remember what they'd chosen).  We moved furniture and put up signs pointing to the various rooms being used, and finally got to go home.

Attendees in the quad

I remember how hot the computer room got during afternoon practicals, an Indian attendee huddled in a coat after the dinner while the rest of us enjoyed the cool of the evening (it was about 18^oC by my car's temperature gauge - pretty cold if you come from the tropics I guess), some fabulous pictures of landscapes in a presentation about new work beginning in South Africa and some lovely data from more advanced projects, talking about science until my throat ached (and if you know me that's a LOT of talking) and a lot of laughing.  So here are a few pictures:

Before a session starts (in the earth science lab)

A summer's evening in the Hull docks area

As usual for conferences, people began to travel home at different points on Thursday, and by Friday afternoon only those who'd both stayed for the last workshop and had further to travel were still around.  We decided to meet up at a pub in Hull's docklands, where people could have fish and chips for supper if they wanted - obviously pub fish and chips are not as good as those purchased from a van (or shop in obscure location, depending on your particular favourite) and eaten out of paper, but they do come with beer.  Sitting around a table talking, teasing and gossiping like a group of old friends even though we'd mostly been strangers at the start of the week really brought home one of the benefits of this job to me - meeting other people who share the same strange interests and curiosity about how the physical world works, and having them become friends as well as colleagues.

Organising this meeting was a huge amount of work - I think we've finally dealt with the last of the expenses claims and bits of paperwork, and can sign off on the last spreadsheet, now it's October.  However, it is also very rewarding - all the intellectual stimulation of a conference PLUS you still get to sleep in your own bed, and don't have to put your pets in kennels.  But maybe we can all go to India or South Africa next time?

Vegetation survey in sunny Spain

by Michelle Farrell (@DrM_Farrell)

In my last blog post a few weeks ago, I gave a brief introduction to the science of palynology, or pollen analysis. Essentially, palynologists analyse the pollen grains preserved in ‘environmental archives’ such as peat bogs or lakes where sediments have accumulated in order to build up a picture of how the surrounding vegetation has changed over time. However, the interpretation of these pollen assemblages is far from straightforward, since pollen grains from different species vary in terms of size, shape and therefore dispersability, and there are also differences in the amount of pollen per unit plant produced by different species due to variation in plant reproductive strategies. For example, wind-pollinated plants need to produce much greater amounts of pollen than insect-pollinated species in order to increase their chances of reproductive success.

 

A key goal since the earliest days of palynology has been the quantitative reconstruction of past vegetation abundance from pollen assemblages. Models of pollen dispersal and deposition have now been developed, and estimation of Relative Pollen Productivity (RPP) is an essential for applying these models to reconstruction of vegetation from pollen records. Empirical estimates of RPP can be extracted from measurements of modern pollen assemblages and vegetation cover, and over the last 10-15 years considerable research effort has been invested in obtaining RPP estimates for key taxa. A recent review reported a wide range of RPP values for individual pollen taxa from different studies across Europe (Broström et al. 2008)‚ but since a standard methodology was not used to record vegetation cover it is not possible to determine whether these differences are due to variation in taxonomic groups (pollen grains can often only be identified to family or genus level, so in different regions a different assemblage of species may make up the palynological equivalent taxon Betula or Poaceae)‚ variations in environmental factors between study sites (e.g. climate‚ management)‚ or reflect the variations in methodology (Bunting and Hjelle 2010).

In May 2010, we held a workshop at the University of Hull which brought together several key researchers in the field of quantitative vegetation reconstruction from pollen records. At this workshop we came up with a standardised method of vegetation survey for obtaining RPP estimates. As part of the Crackles Bequest Project Jane Bunting and I, along with a team of European project partners, have applied this method to compare estimates of RPP within individual species across a wide climatic range and in different habitats. We’ll write more about the results of this project in future blog posts.

The majority of researchers who are interested in using models of pollen dispersal and deposition to quantitatively reconstruct past vegetation cover are based in north-west Europe, and as a result this is where most research activity to date has been focussed. The approach is now beginning to be adopted worldwide, and we are now collaborating with groups working in India, South Africa and South America to obtain estimates of RPP for common taxa in their regions. A little closer to home, research groups based in southern Europe are using the standardised vegetation survey protocol developed for the Crackles Bequest Project to taxa of interest for reconstructing Mediterranean environments. 

In June 2013 I was invited to join a team from the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Zaragoza, Spain on their fieldwork near the town of Teruel in the east of the country. Their research project is focused on the palaeolake at Villarquemado, from which they have recovered a 74m long sequence for pollen analysis. The group are now working towards estimating RPP for six key taxa in this sequence to enable them to quantitatively reconstruct the former vegetation in this area. I joined the group for a week to demonstrate the standardised vegetation survey methodology and to learn more about their research.

The palaeolake at Villarquemado, now mostly infilled and supporting fen-type vegetation

After a false start (I arrived at Leeds-Bradford airport on the day I was due to fly to Barcelona to find that all flights were cancelled due to a French air traffic control strike!), I eventually arrived in Zaragoza two days later than originally planned. I was met at the railway station in Zaragoza by my colleague’s husband, and we then drove for approximately two hours to the village that we would be staying in. Incidentally, if anyone is planning a holiday in this region you could do worse than to stay at the house we rented for the week – it was absolutely beautiful!

The following day we made an early start to avoid the worst of the heat (although I have to say that 30^oC was still a bit of a shock to my system, coming as I had straight from the miserable British summer that we had been having at that point!) and headed to one of the group's sampling locations. There are some differences between working in north-west Europe and in the Mediterranean region - for example in our fieldwork areas we normally collect a moss polster as our pollen 'trap', but since moss is pretty hard to come by in semi-arid Mediterranean environments 'Tauber traps' had to be used by the Spanish research group. These are essentially plastic containers sunk into the ground so that the top is at ground level, with a hole in the lid to allow the pollen rain to be collected. The team will return to empty the traps at the end of the flowering season to ensure that a full year of pollen rain is collected, so for now our task was to survey the surrounding vegetation.
 

The view from one of our sampling sites - very different to the lush green landscapes that I am used to working in in north-west Europe. Although I'm told that this is an unusually wet year and that everything is much more green than usual...

View from another sampling site, with the Tauber trap visible in the foreground

Once we had all got to grips with the intricacies of the survey method, the team worked incredibly efficiently, and we managed to survey all 12 sites in five days. We also had fantastic logistical support from the husbands of two members of the survey team, who arrived to meet us every lunch time with hampers full of goodies to fuel us through the afternoon! For me, there were huge benefits to joining my Spanish colleagues for a week – I got to know people that I had previously met only at conferences much better, I made new friends, I got to experience fieldwork in a totally different environment to that which I am used to working in, and I learned a lot about Mediterranean plants and environments. I’m really looking forward to seeing the results once Edu has processed all the pollen and vegetation data from this field season!