At the ESA-SER joint annual meeting in San Jose

I just drove out to San Jose earlier today (or is it yesterday already?) to attend the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), being held jointly this year with the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER). The theme is: Ecological Restoration in a Changing World. The meeting formally opened on Sunday evening with a plenary session and a mixer, and it was great to meet with a number of friends and colleagues. The hard science sessions start tomorrow and will last until Friday afternoon, although there are some workshops spilling past those temporal boundaries. I will try to blog about stuff that catches my eye as and when I can, but first we (Karl Kraft and I) have to present our paper tomorrow afternoon. (And that, along with sweating on a couple of grant proposals over the past month, is my excuse for the relative low frequency of my blogging here this summer!)

One of the first persons I ran into by the SJSU dorm elevators, while dropping off a friend (I'm not staying at the dorm as my family is crashing at a friends place so our kids and theirs can play while Kaberi and I try to attend as much of the meeting as we can), had a name tag (R. Ford Denison) that caught my eye. While my brain was trying to process where I had seen that name, he wondered if we were Mexican ecologists (not the first time I've been mistaken for a Mexican). After explaining that we were actually from India, I also mentioned that, as it happened, we had merely driven over from Fresno State. He immediately perked up and said someone from Fresno State had commented on his blog recently - and it all clicked into place! I realized that the very first person I had spoken to at this meeting was none other than the author of This Week in Evolution, a blog I have referred to, and indeed have on my blogroll here! Funny coincidence, isn't it? Nice to meet at least one of the science blogging brethren here, even as several others are in the neighborhood not far from here at the Googleplex for the Science Foo camp that has scienceblogs abuzz today! I hope I run into some more bloggers here, although it isn't going to be easy to actually find them at such a large meeting - about 4000 registered attendees. It is hard enough to track down people one already knows in the flesh (meatspace), let alone trying to hook up with acquaintances from the blogosphere! However, if you are reading this and are at the ESA this week, leave me a note here!