Regarding the format of the conference, I tend to agree. I have been to ESP things in the past and was at their conference in Wageningen, Netherlands last year. I’m not convinced that they know hoe to run a conference. It was all fairly chaotic and a bit of a mess. Following that I have sworn not to go to another of their conferences until I hear they have sorted their stuff out.

5 minutes per talk is pretty insane. I’m not against speed presentations like they do at SCB events but having all talks that length? Nuts.

On the science side of things I completely agree with you that we need to get the biophysical stuff right with ES. So much of the ES stuff relies on large scale spatial modelling but I’d be interested to see people do a bit more field based stuff quantifying ES and relating their provision to land-use changes etc. There is a lot of need for empirical work so we can get away from the current vague, hand-wavy nature of ES science as it currently is.

Thanks for the report. Re the naming dilemma, I agree completely. I even struggle with ‘biodiversity conservation’ (BC) as a term. Look at it from a young child’s point of view. Terms like that are enough to turn any student away from pursuing a career in conservation biology. I still don’t see what was wrong with ‘flora and fauna’ or even ‘wildlife conservation’. At least the average person on the street knows what that means. I know that biodiversity also includes those important little soil microbes and so on. But if you talk about BC (in a national park context for instance) that also, incidentally, includes Cane Toads, cats, weeds and the flora in the guts of the tourists! So I would argue that ‘BC’ is just as clumsy as ‘wildlife conservation’ but without the majority of the population knowing what it means. I read somewhere that when asked – some people in the street thought that BC was a new kind of washing powder. And a science teacher in Tasmania deleted the term and replaced it with “Big Nature” so that his students could get their heads around it!