With the COVID-19 pandemic, attending webinars and conferences has changed significantly with most moving to using online conferencing tools. During April, I delivered a webinar to my case partner organisation, AFBI (Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute) as part of their online lunchtime lecture series. Being given the opportunity to present my research was an excellent way to hear new perspectives on my work from the following Q and A session.
I also attended my first online conference in April of vEGU21 (European Geosciences Union) and in May I attended EGF 2021 (21st Symposium of the European Grassland Federation), both conferences were held virtually and focused on mostly using Zoom to facilitate presentations and discussions using breakout rooms.
For vEGU21, this conference lasted two weeks and covers a wide range of disciplines, offering presentations, networking and exhibitor events, and short courses. With a virtual conference centre having been designed specially it was easy to navigate to different options and browse the course programme for different talks and events. I chose to present my research looking at “Combining sub-field scale soil sampling and GIS interpolation techniques for mapping nutrient hotspots” and delivered this in a 2 minute single slide talk given over Zoom, with a following breakout room allowing participants to talk to authors and ask questions. vEGU21 also allowed additional display materials to be uploaded to accompany your abstract and supplement your talk and I chose to upload an additional pre-recorded PowerPoint.
https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU21/EGU21-2653.html#materials
For EGF, I submitted a short paper on “Using LiDAR derived Digital Terrain Models and field data to quantify riverbank erosion and nutrient loading rates” and was invited to give a poster presentation to accompany this paper. To deliver this poster, conference participants were grouped into specific themes and displayed posters virtually using breakout rooms in Zoom and answered questions from the audience viewing the online posters. This conference featured more discipline specific presentations on using remote sensing in grasslands and lasted for three days but offered a range of interesting talks on many aspects of grassland management. The conference paper is available to download as part of a pdf from the following link:
https://www.europeangrassland.org/en/infos/printed-matter/proceedings.html
