NSF Award
2333754
BIOGEOMON 2024 will be held January 7-11,2024. It is the 11th international conference focused on understanding ecosystem biogeochemistry of soils, forests, rivers, and wetlands with special attention given to anthropogenic effects studied at the watershed, landscape, and global scale. BIOGEOMON 2024 will be held at University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, a Hispanic-serving institution in San Juan, Puerto Rico, marking the first time BIOGEOMON will be held in a tropical landscape. While the BIOGEOMON conferences have always attracted a diverse group of attendees, the 2024 organizing committee is emphasizing diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility (DEIJA) explicitly in the conference design. Travel subsidies funded through this grant will open attendance to many more students, early career scientists, and scientists from under-represented groups from Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and throughout the continental USA. <br/><br/>Incorporating changes to both the conference program and the support team for attendees will help this conference serve as a model in how to broaden participation and scope of inclusive small conferences. While most of the requested funds will be used to provide travel grants to early career scientists from underrepresented groups, the organizing committee has planned several events that will educate all attendees on issues related to equity and diversity in the field of biogeochemistry, including a DEIJA forum and a workshop on the socioeconomic and sociocultural dimensions of biogeochemical research. The committee will use recommendations gathered from peer-reviewed literature and reports on running inclusive conferences to implement a variety of measures that will make the conference more inclusive as well as enhance the scientific program, including incorporating Universal Design principles into talks and meeting rooms, providing extensive networking opportunities, designing a conference code of conduct, and establishing a group of onsite Inclusivity Liaisons who can assist attendees during the conference. The organizing committee will gather data on the effectiveness of these measures before, during, and after the conference which will be included in a report that can be used by organizers when planning future conferences.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
