Call for Posters (AAG) - Physical Geography

There will be a special poster session at this year's AAG meeting coordinated to coincide with the Physical Geography Symposium on environmental reconstruction.  A description of the session and other information is given below.  If any of you would like to present a poster at this session, please contact Don Sullivan ([email protected]) or Maria Caffrey ([email protected]) as soon as possible so that we may group our posters together in a special PEC-sponsored subsection.

The Physical Geography poster session is on Thursday, April 23, 2015 at the AAG meeting in Chicago.
Please join our effort to promote the Physical Geography poster session that will take place on Thursday afternoon, April 23, 2015 at the AAG meeting in Chicago.  We encourage ALL physical geographers, at all career stages, to consider presenting their work in poster format at this year's AAG meeting.

Here is the vision: The session will be set up to hold 100 posters, grouped by theme and/or specialty group.  As part of the Physical Geography Symposium on environmental reconstruction, a featured section of the poster session will be dedicated to posters on topics related to environmental reconstruction. Other sections will be open to all types of research in physical geography.  With the aim of giving posters at our AAG meeting the level of organization and respect given to posters at American Geophysical Union meetings, we will work with you to identify and name (with signage) sections or sub-sections that pertain specifically to your specialty group.  For example, it would be possible hold your own group's poster competition as part of this larger event.

One advantage of this large poster session is that posters will be up for 8 hours: they will be put up from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm and remain on display until 7:30 pm. Presenters won't need to be there the entire time. They are encouraged to stand by their posters during the happy hour period (4:30 to 7:30).  Another advantage is that happy hour refreshments will be available beginning at 4:30 pm-the poster session is intended to cap off the Physical Geography Symposium and be a gathering and networking place for physical geographers. 

We hope that the large size of the poster session, the refreshments, the opportunity to have one's poster visible for many hours, and the chance to hang out with potentially hundreds of physical geographers, from famous names to new blood, will make this an attractive option for presenters and attendees.  We already know that the session will be on Thursday afternoon, so those who present in it can plan their AAG travel dates even before the final program is released (no last-minute discoveries of being the last presenter on the last day). 

The Chicago AAG meeting's Physical Geography Symposium on environmental reconstruction and high-visibility poster session are new ventures in the AAG.  We hope that symposia and large poster sessions of this type (now and in future years) will help build community and across-specialty-group acquaintances among physical geographers.  Also, putting more attention on posters has the potential to reduce the number of small oral sessions and free up session times for special themed sessions and symposia.

A few nuts and bolts:  Physical geographers should submit their poster abstracts directly to the AAG meeting organizers (note the Nov. 5th deadline).  They should use the Special Requests area on the abstract submission form to indicate interest in being in this session, including requests (if appropriate) for inclusion in the environmental reconstruction section of the poster session, and send Carol Harden ([email protected]) a copy of their abstract confirmation.  Any specialty group or individual who wishes to identify/coordinate a special sub-section of the poster session should contact Carol Harden with the theme and participant names.  Meanwhile, Carol and a small team of volunteers will work with the meeting organizers to organize the posters in this large session.  What if too many abstracts are submitted for a 100-place poster session?  We'll cross that bridge when we come to it... (after all, this is a work in progress and that would be a happy problem).

Should you have any questions, please contact Dr. Carol Harden at [email protected]