The Status of Insects RCN Annual Meeting will be held virtually January 25-26, 2024. Anyone with an interest in the causes and consequences of insect decline, and solutions to mitigate insect biodiversity loss, is welcome to attend the meeting. Please extend this invitation to colleagues, students, and other networks you are part of that may be interested in attending. We especially want to encourage graduate students and other early career researchers to get involved.

See below for the schedule of sessions; all times shown are UTC. Click the + Google Calendar icon in the bottom right to add it to your own calendar and sync to your time zone. You can also download the .ics file and import it to your calendar at https://tinyurl.com/RCNics
The goal for the meeting is to bring everyone together to see more of what all the RCN Working Groups are doing, have dedicated time to work on products and discuss ideas, and to network with other folk working on similar topics around the globe. Much of the meeting will be focused on Working Group activities, but there will also be plenary talks, a poster session, social events, and an art gallery.

The meeting will be entirely virtual and will run continuously for roughly 48 hours straight so that no matter what time zone you are in, there will be meeting activities scheduled during your working (or at least waking) hours. Register to attend the meeting here so that we can set you up with access to the meeting platform.

Plenary speakers

We have some fantastic plenary speakers lined up who will present on a wide range of topics related to insect biodiversity change and insect conservation:

• Dr. Monika Böhm, Global Center for Species Survival and the Indianapolis Zoo
• Dr. Sevgan Subramanian, Head of Environmental Health at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology
• Dr. Filipe França,Assistant Professor, University of Bristol and the SYNERGIZE project
• Dr. Jessica Ware, Associate Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History

We hope you will be able to join us for this annual meeting!

Call for posters

There will be a virtual poster session during the meeting. We especially encourage students, early career researchers, and people seeking international collaborators to expand current or planned projects to submit a poster. Posters do not have to be new - you are welcome to present a recent poster from a local, regional, or taxon-specific meeting since it will be new to many folks at this meeting.

Posters will be viewable throughout the meeting, so people may visit your poster outside of the designated poster session as well.

To submit a poster, please fill out this form. Submissions need to be made by January 15 to give the organizers time to create the virtual poster session. The form will ask you for:

• Poster title
• Author(s) and affiliations
• A brief abstract in English*
• A brief abstract in any language (optional)
• A PDF version of your poster
• A short (less than 3 minute) video describing your poster (optional)

*If you would like assistance with English language editing, please email egrames@binghamton.edu

Language

This is an international meeting, and therefore posters can be submitted in any language. Please submit your poster in whatever language you are most comfortable engaging with scientific writing and presentation. You may wish to favor clear graphics over text to help with interpretation across languages.

Optional videos may also be in any language, however, we ask that you please consider including closed captions in English (including if your spoken language in the video is English) to improve engagement in the poster session and make videos more accessible to all participants.

Format

Please keep in mind that people will be viewing posters virtually, and in many cases from a laptop screen, so aim to make them easily readable and accessible. Posters must be submitted as one-page PDFs to be uploaded to the meeting platform, preferably in landscape format.