This award will provide support for a Gordon Research Conference on Plant-Herbivore Interaction to be held in Ventura, CA, February 24 - March 1, 2013. This conference focuses on emerging topics and features a mix of empirical and theoretical emphases. Sessions featuring talks and posters are discussion-oriented, allowing for lively interdisciplinary conversations to be initiated and continued throughout the meeting. The goal of the conference is to stimulate the production of critical insights into how plants defend themselves, ways in which herbivores overcome plant defenses, how other organisms, from microbes to predators, alter plant defenses and herbivore performance, and whether these species-specific interactions scale up to communities and landscapes. Research perspectives to be addressed include defense evolution in plants, the interplay between secondary metabolites and plant nutrients, the consequences of prior attack (induction) to plant defense expression and to the distribution and abundance of herbivores, microbial mediation of plant-herbivore-enemy interactions, and how shifts at the community or landscape level alter these interactions.
Broader Impacts: The relaxed atmosphere of this conference is designed to generate stimulating interactions, lasting networks, and interdisciplinary collaborations. This award will be used to support the attendance of young scientists, including graduate students, post docs and assistant professors with efforts in place to recruit underrepresented minorities.
The Gordon Research Conference on PLANT-HERBIVORE INTERACTION Ventura Beach Marriott, Ventura, California, February 24 – March 1, 2013. The Conference was well-attended with 198 participants (attendees list attached). The attendees represented the spectrum of endeavor in this field coming from academia, industry, and government laboratories, both U.S. and foreign scientists, senior researchers, young investigators, and students. Of the 198 attendees, 98 voluntarily responded to a general inquiry regarding ethnicity which appears on our registration forms. Of the 98 respondents, 11% were Minorities –4% Hispanic, 5% Asian and 2% African American. Approximately 41% of the participants at the 2013 meeting were women. In designing the formal speakers program, emphasis was placed on current unpublished research and discussion of the future target areas in this field. There was a conscious effort to stimulate lively discussion about the key issues in the field today. Time for formal presentations was limited in the interest of group discussions. In order that more scientists could communicate their most recent results, poster presentation time was scheduled. Attached is a copy of the formal schedule and speaker program and the poster program. In addition to these formal interactions, "free time" was scheduled to allow informal discussions. Such discussions are fostering new collaborations and joint efforts in the field. Thank you for your support of this Conference. As you know, in the interest of promoting the presentation of unpublished and frontier-breaking research, Gordon Research Conferences does not permit publication of meeting proceedings.
