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1999 ANNUAL MEETING: NOTES FROM THE LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

The 13th annual meeting of the SCB was held 17-21 June at the University of Maryland, College Park. The meeting was hosted by the graduate program in Sustainable Development and Conservation Biology and the Smithsonian Institution's Institute for Conservation Biology. Seventeen sponsors (for a list see the meeting web site, www.inform.umd.edu/SCB) helped subsidize the cost of the meeting and attendance by students and international visitors.

Approximately 780 people registered for the meeting. Two evening plenary sessions focused on the meeting's theme, Integrating policy and science in conservation biology. They featured Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt (who took in stride the group of protesters that greeted him) and a panel of speakers from the World Bank, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Justice, and Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Seventy-six people presented posters and 242 speakers presented talks. Seven symposia were held (one sponsored by the University of Maryland's Research Training Grant on the Biology of Small Populations); collectively, these included 47 speakers. In addition, special sessions were held by NASA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and The Nature Conservancy, and several workshops were run (including two on teaching conservation biology and one on scientific societies and policy advocacy, and how to take conservation science to Capitol Hill). Twenty-nine exhibitors displayed books, equipment, literature, and so forth during the meeting. The Sunday evening picnic at the National Zoo, which also featured the annual awards ceremony, attracted about 350. Nine field trips held on Monday similarly drew a good number of participants.

The meeting was generally acknowledged to have run smoothly, and I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of people who wrote me to say so after the meeting. Thanks to the local organizing committee (Jim Dietz, Katrina Brandon, Michael Hutchins, Chris Wemmer, and Don Wilson) for their two years of excellent planning, the campus office of Conference and Visitor Services for help with logistics, and the many volunteer graduate students from the University of Maryland who assisted with audio-visual equipment in all the sessions, hosted a picnic for visiting graduate students, and wore the yellow staff t-shirts so they'd be conspicuous as guides. Other volunteers helped with the picnic at the Zoo (thanks Nola Chow), arranged for our plenary speakers (thanks Tom Lovejoy), and led or hosted field trips. The meeting wouldn't have been possible without all these volunteers.

David Inouye, Chair, Local organizing committee

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