[Aqualist] 2018 AQUA Biennial Conference

[Scott Mooney]

Dear Australasian Quaternary Community,

The 2018 AQUA Biennial Conference will be held from Monday 10th to Friday 14th December in the Crawford Precinct on the Acton Peninsula, in Canberra ACT. This is an excellent venue, overlooking Lake Burley Griffin, and located between the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia. A pre-conference field trip (High altitude environments of eastern Australia) is currently being organised for December 5th to the 8th.

The Biennial Conference aims to bring together scientists, academics, researchers and scholars in the field of Quaternary science from across Australasia. The meeting is the premier interdisciplinary platform for the presentation of new science and research results in all matters associated with the Quaternary, with topics of interest including, but not limited to:

·      Quaternary environments and processes;

·      The last full glacial cycle, and climatic change on orbital-timescales;

·      Last glacial maximum and post-glacial climates and environmental change;

·      Sources of climatic change and variability;

·      Human migration and impacts;

·      Palaeoenvironmental proxies, techniques and numerical methods for the identification of change;

·      Geomorphology, biogeography and archaeology; and,

·      palaeolimnology, palaeoclimatology and palaeoecology.

We have designed several formats for presenting research at the conference: a traditional poster session, 3-minute talks in front of a poster (specifically designed to introduce new students or to communicate new research), long talks (30 mins; morning and after lunch sessions) and short talks (of 20 minutes each, in the session between morning tea and lunch). The session after afternoon tea each day (Monday to Thursday) will include an invited talk of 30 minutes to canvass broader issues in AQUA and a Keynote talk. On the last day of the conference (Friday the 14th of December) we will visit Lake George to hear about the latest research and that evening will continue with the now traditional trivia evening.

Rather than arrange ‘sessions’ the organising committee will be making an open call for abstracts soon and the accepted papers (determined by October 2018) will be arranged thematically.

At the recent 2018 AGM the Australasian Quaternary Association exec re-affirmed its commitment to the support of students, early career researchers and for those who are not currently in full-time employment. We are pleased to announce an increase in our support to attend the 2018 Biennial Conference for these groups with reduced registration fees and subsidized prices for the conference dinner. We will be opening registration (via the AQUA website http://aqua.org.au/conference/aqua2018/) asap and will announce prices via this list server.

If you would like a poster to help advertise the AQUA 2018 Biennial Conference, please download it from http://aqua.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Canberra-poster-2.pdf as we cannot do attachments on the AQUA list server.


sdm
(on behalf of the organising committee)

Scott Mooney

School of BEES
UNSW Sydney 2052
Australia.