It’s been a few weeks since ESA 2026 in Salt Lake City. A few very busy weeks for me. But I’m cleaning up open tabs on my phone browser and it has me reflecting on the conference.
I got to SLC early to participate in the Macrosystems Ecology for All annual meeting. I’ve been involved with MEFA for a while now, both as a member of the Network Advisory Team and as a member of one of the project groups. The working meeting started with a talk Thursday evening from Dr. Elizabeth LaRue, which was really good and I’m looking forward to diving in to more of her research in the future. Our group, which is focused on the macroecology of impacts of invasive species on ecosystem level processes, such as productivity, had a really great and productive set of days, but being honest, I arrived at the start of ESA a little tired already. Partly that was because I was also prepping materials for the workshop I taught on Sunday for the Vegetation Section on Quantitative Community Ecology in R. This is the second year I taught the workshop and I showed up far more prepared than last year. Overall, I think it went well, but I only got through about half of the material that was prepared. It’s a lot for a three hour session!
Aside from the workshop, I was at ESA Mon-Wed and spent a fair amount of time attending talks. I tended toward the data science / AI-related talks, with a smattering of other talks by friends, colleagues, or students of colleagues. Regarding AI and its use in ecology, I left with the impression that there is a lot of mixed feelings about it in ecology, which mirrors pretty much all other aspects of AI use in our lives right now, I suppose. Very clearly some folks are using AI to do really interesting work - pretty much everything I saw associate with the Imageomics group was very cool, including the plennary talk. And to be clear, the AI use most folks were talking about weren’t LLMs, but rather computer vision and other machine learning approaches, which have frankly been around and in use for a while now. But still, in the sessions I was in, there seemed to be just about as much unease as there was excitement.
The funny thing about ESA is that as I sat in the airport Wed night I thought ‘wow, there was a lot of AI stuff’. But then I was skimming the program website and seeing all the sessions with titles like “Invasive Ecology 3” or “Community Ecology 4”, and I remembered that I had just curated my experience at the conference, and I could have probably gone three days of watching folks report on their recent field collections and what not. I’m sorta comforted by that thought.