ECCB 2009 Steering Commitee Meeting

The Steering Committee of the 2nd European Congress of Conservation Biology met with the Local Organizing Committee at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. The meeting started at 8:00 with a visit to the venue where the congress will take place. The Committee was really happy with the facilities offered by the University Congress Center. The place looks really wonderful. There will be two rooms with around 500 people capacity that will be connected by a video conference system and that will be used for the plenary talks. The Conference Center has capacity for up to twelve parallel sessions, although we hope to be able to keep the congress with no more than 8 or 10 parallel sessions.
At 9:00 we started the formal meeting. The LOC presented how is the current situation. Abstract submission is now closed and the congress has received over 1200 abstracts. This is a 50% increase in abstract submission compared to ECCB 2006!. So we are expecting around 1500 participants in Prague. It is going to be a huge congress!
The Steering Committee meeting was very successful. The BoD was very happy with all that has been accomplished by the Local Committee. Distribution of information about the congress has been really good as can be seen from the number of different countries submitting abstracts.