Home

 
Program

Detailed program

Symposia

Information for presenters

Awards

Working groups

 
Registration

Location

Food & lodging

Getting there

Field trips

About the ASN

Contact us

 
Forum  
  Information for presenters

Call For Contributed Oral Presentations
There will be three or four concurrent sessions each morning for the three days of the conference. During registration, you can submit a title and abstract for an oral presentation. Abstracts should be less than 150 words, titles less than 25 words. Please also provide up to 6 key words to help us place your presentation in an appropriate session. Note that not all oral presentations may be accepted, due to time limits, in which case you may be offered the option of a poster or a lightning talk.

The conference will include a variety of talk formats. Some sessions will use lightning talk formats with more time for discussion: 5 minute talk, 5 minute Q&A, with panel discussions among all presenters at the end of the session. Other sessions will use more traditional 15 minute talk slots (12 minute presentation, 3 minutes for questions). The short talk formats are intended to leave more time for formal and informal discussions. When registering you will have an opportunity to indicate which talk format you prefer to do.

Please note that the registration website times out after 240 minutes. We recommend you prepare your 150-word abstract in advance and paste it in during registration

Call for contributed posters
There will be one poster session per day, unopposed by any talks. During registration, you can submit a title and abstract for a poster presentation. Abstracts should be less than 150 words, titles less than 25 words.

Please note that the registration website times out after 240 minutes. We recommend you prepare your 150-word abstract in advance and paste it in during registration

Guidelines for All Oral Presentations (Talks)

  • Talks will be a mixture of lightning talks (5 minute presentation with 5 minute Q&A allowing for more feedback) and regular talks (12 minute presentation, 3 minute Q&A). The Q&A session belongs to the audience, not to the speaker. The Q&A period allows for questions, discussion, introduction of the next speaker, and travel between rooms. The Q&A will be managed by the session presider
  • Each contributed talk may be scheduled any day or time during the conference. By submitting an abstract, it is expected that the presenting author will be available during ANY of these time slots. Special scheduling requests CANNOT be honored and talks CANNOT be moved once scheduling is complete.

Important Information About Formatting Oral Presentations (Talks)
This section describes recommended presentation formats and practices for oral presentations. We realize that losing speaking time due to technical glitches or other problems is a frustrating and stressful experience. This information is provided to presenters in advance in order to help minimize problems on the day of your presentation.

  • For all formats, we advise presenters to test their slides in advance on a computer provided at the conference site.
  • All presenters are expected to arrive at their session room at least 20 minutes in advance of the start of their session. This time is for checking in with the session presider and allows the projectionist to transfer your presentation to the dedicated laptop. Please bring a copy of your presentation on a CD or USB Flash drive.
  • Each meeting room will be equipped with a dedicated LCD projector and PC laptop. We discourage speakers swapping in their own laptops.
  • Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat are the preferred formats for slides. These file types will work most smoothly on the laptops we provide. Plug-ins have been loaded so that anything created in earlier versions of Office should still open without any issues.
  • Please do not use Presenter View in PowerPoint. This often causes problems for the next presenter when multiple slideshows are open at the same time on the same computer. Troubleshooting the settings and restoring them to the defaults often eats into presentation time.
  • Presenters may use a different digital slide format as long as it is technically compatible with our laptops. While the preferred formats are less likely to cause any technical problems on the day of your presentation, you may use a different format if you wish to do so; however, it is the speaker’s responsibility to make sure that their presentation will run smoothly. You should save your files in a format compatible with MS Office 2010 for Windows 7. The laptops also have Adobe Flash installed. We strongly advise you to check your presentation in a Speaker Ready Room in advance if you are using one of these other formats.
  • Prezi and other cloud-based formats can be used. Be sure to check that our laptops meet their technical requirements and that you will be able to export a portable file in advance. Although our laptops are wireless enabled, the availability of a wireless connection varies between meeting sites and even in years when it is present, its reliability will vary from room to room. We strongly advise against relying on an internet connection for a presentation since you may not be able to reliably connect to a cloud-based service from the session room. Instructions for downloading a portable Prezi file can be found here.
  • There are some formats which often do not work on our laptops! Corel presentations, embedded videos, animations, and Mac file formats typically cause problems. If you plan to use these, you may need to use your own computer.
  • You may use your own laptop for your presentation if necessary. We recommend testing your presentation on our laptops first since disconnecting and reconnecting speakers’ computers can disrupt sessions. If you do need to use your own PC or Mac laptop, you will need to connect it to the LCD projector. We ask that you be considerate of the presenter following you and make sure your technical setup does not take away from any of their presentation time. Please arrive at your session early to make sure that you and/or the A/V volunteer can disconnect and reconnect the dedicated laptop without any problems.
  • Mac users will need to bring their own VGA dongle. ASN does not provide these adapters.
  • Laser pointers will be provided for each session. These will be picked up in advance by the session presiders.

© American Society of Naturalists