Northwest Scientific Association annual meeting March 24 to 27 in NSC

The Northwest Scientific Association's 82^nd annual meeting will be held at the college from March 24 to 27 in the New Science Center. This event is co-sponsored by Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership of the Ecoregional Science Conference and the Northwest Lichenologists.

The theme of the conference will be disturbances, biological legacies, and conservation of areas from Mt. St. Helens to the Oak-Prairie lowlands.

Scientists, students, researchers and interested community members are welcome to attend. However, pre-registration is necessary, including cost of attendance, field trips and a banquet meal. Priority registration is March 10, and afterwards costs will increase.

Cost of attendance is $120 for professionals, $145 after March 10, or $50 for students. The banquet meal costs $40 per person and boxed lunches for the field trips range from $12 to $30, depending on the selection. 

A 2010 Student Research Grant will be available. More information about the grant can be found on the Northwest Science web page.

The two groups, Northwest Science Association and Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership, will be producing an issue of Northwest Science from the abstracts indicated as offered to the journal when submitted. Topics for submission include woodland ecology, management and conservation for the valley to prairie areas.

Specific topics will be covered, including presentations on the Mt. St. Helens eruptive period and Prairie-Oak Woodland restoration and management.

Also, general sessions will be held on many topics, including tectonics and magnetism, geomorphology, geologic hazards and paleontology, a variety of different biology topics, invasive species control, rare species reintroductions, climate change and ecology and the human dimension.

March 24 events will include discussing how to restore invaded prairies and a pre-field trip meeting. In the evening there will be a gathering at the Olympic Club. The next day, there will be a symposia and technical sessions, another gathering in the evening, a silent auction and a banquet.

March 26 will include another symposia, concurrently running technical and poster sessions. There will be Northwest Science Association and Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership business meetings with lunches.

Symposium topics will include "The Biological, Landscape, and Disturbance Legacies of Railroad Logging:  50 to 130 Years of Post-Disturbance Recovery," "Floristic Quality Assessment: Opportunities for Application in the Pacific Northwest" and "People-Plant Interactions On Prairie-Oak Woodland landscapes through time."

March 27 will consist of field trips to the Mima Mounds and the south Puget Sound. The groups will be comparing the Willamette and Puget prairies.