Last summer I attended two major ecological conferences, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and the British Ecological Society (BES) annual meetings. Both of these had significant contributions from palynologists and paleoecologists. At the ESA, Beth Lynch presided over the Paleoecology session which featured nine talks addressing a range of paleoecological indicators including testate amoebae, macrofossils, pollen, oxygen isotopes and photoprotective organic compounds. The topics presented were diverse and ranged from species ranges at the LGM to lake effect snow in the paleo record to the taxonomic stability of squamate reptiles in the Quaternary. A highlight of the meeting was the special evening session organized by Bryan Shuman entitled 'The Future of Paleoecology'. This two-hour event brought together members of the Paleoecology section of the ESA and a few interested others, about 40 people. The meeting began with a report on the results of an ESA-funded survey on highly influential paleoecological literature. If you would like to review the literature submitted to the survey, you can add a reference at http://www.life.uiuc.edu/hu/ESAsurvey/index.html and then view the entire database. Then Stephen Jackson spoke about the goals and major current issues in paleoecology from the perspective of terrestrial ecosystems. He identified the need to keep focussing on issues of taphonomy, generating baseline data on natural variability that can be used by ecologists and managers and the importance of developing and testing our own paleoecological theories. Richard Brugam spoke about the power of paleolimnology to explore both human impact on aquatic ecosystems as well as the long-term dynamics and development of lake ecosystems. The meeting ended with a discussion of goals for the field of paleoecology. These goals included a continued commitment to interdisciplinary, multi-proxy studies, better integration of evolutionary and genetic changes, the importance of looking beyond North America and Europe, and taking advantage of the current explosion in high resolution paleoclimatic studies to compare with the biological responses we see in our indicators and to rigorously test our own proxies.

For more information, contact the ESA paleoecology section chair, Dan Gavin, dgavin@life.uiuc.edu Next year's ESA meeting will be held in Portland, Oregon, August 1-6, 2004. See http://www.esa.org/portland/

The BES meeting featured a special session organized by the Mires Research Group (MRG) entitled "The past is the key to the present? Temporal scales in wetland ecology". This day-long event began with a keynote speech by Barry Warner from the University of Waterloo who placed peatland research into a wider context and featured beautiful slides from his field sites around the world. He explained his expanded concept of community ecology in which paleoecology is a necessary component to understanding contemporary dynamics in wetlands. There were ten subsequent papers, dealing with hydrological processes in peat, the competitive dynamics of Sphagnum species, modern pollen vegetation studies, hydroseral succession, using the pollen record to identify cryptic invaders, changes in British bog vegetation through the Holocene and peat deposits as geochemical archives for inorganic elements. Authors were from Britain, Europe and North America. A memorable part of the meeting was the successful field trip to Fenn's, Whixall and Bettisfield Mosses National Nature Reserve, straddling the border of Shropshire, England and North term bog restoration project and gave us a walking tour, showing us some aggressive techniques to restore bog vegetation. This sparked an interesting debate about what is natural and what the targets of ecological restoration should be in Britain, and the significant role of paleoecology in answering these questions. For more information, contact the chair of the BES Mires Research Group, Deborah Pearce, dpearce@BROOKES.AC.UK

Next year's BES meeting will be held at the University of Lancaster, Sept. 7-9, 2004. The Mires Research Group is already exploring possibilities for a field trip around Lancaster during the meeting and is hoping for a continued international presence at their meetings. See http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/

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This article first appeared in CAP Newsletter 23(2):19, 2003.