Online Section Manual

DESCRIPTIONS OF TECHNICAL SESSION CATEGORIES

Please keep in mind when pulling together your technical program, in order to attract a large number of meeting participants, you must have a well-rounded program. The number, diversity, and quality of sessions will directly affect meeting attendance and the success of the meeting. It is important that all major discipline categories are covered by an appropriate theme or symposium session.

Below are descriptions of the different technical sessions.

These sessions are designed to promote the exchange of timely or state-of-the-art information and to allow scheduling of interdisciplinary talks on a specific topic. Theme Sessions are like the annual meeting topical sessions. The difference is that abstracts submitted to a theme are 100% volunteered—there are no invited talks. It is important that session organizers be proactive in soliciting appropriate abstracts.

These sessions typically are on the leading edge of a scientific discipline or area of public policy, address broad fundamental problems, are interdisciplinary, or which focus on global problems. The sessions contain mostly invited talks. Organizers of these sessions must seek out speakers to submit abstracts who are knowledgeable in the topic. These sessions should be considered a big draw for meeting attendees.

These sessions are created by volunteered abstracts submitted to a particular discipline/category. For example, there are ten abstracts sitting in the abstracts pool where the authors have selected Hydrogeology as their discipline category preference. Those papers can be placed in a general discipline session for Hydrogeology. In recent years, the number of general discipline sessions has declined in proportion to theme sessions.

Nevertheless, a substantial number of abstracts are still submitted under this heading. To assure that those who might want to submit an abstract, which doesn't fit the proposed Theme or Symposium Sessions, the call for abstracts (on the meeting web site at "Submit an Abstract") should make it boldly clear that abstracts which don't fit a theme session, may be submitted for consideration to the Discipline Sessions. The bottom line is that you want to maximize abstract submissions.

If an event (like earthquake or flood) happens prior to your meeting dates, but too late for publication in the abstracts book, there is also the possibly of creating a late breaking session to have during your meeting. Please contact Heather Clark hclark@geosociety.org if this is the case.