How shall we meet? Embracing the opportunities of virtual conferencing

The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic triggered dramatic shifts in the way that ecologists teach, research, and interact (e.g., Cooke et al. 2021). As the world now adjusts to a “new normal” era, there is notable and open discussion about the merits or desire to return to practices used prior to the pandemic (e.g., Roulson 2021). A dominant aspect of these discussions is when and how researchers can return to the practice of large, centralized, in-person conferences that have been the primary mode of professional interaction for decades. While questions of safety are naturally paramount and will guide decision making for some time, there remains the broader question of whether and how to implement virtual and hybrid formats in the future.

Discussions about the return to in-person meetings and expressed resentment about the use of virtual formats (Stevens and Murphy 2021) that we routinely see circulated by professional organizations and on social media assume that the latter is a lesser-quality version of the former. However, we put forward that these sentiments neglect the diversity of opinions among scientists and evidence of prevalent, positive attitudes about the use of virtual (and possibly, as yet undeveloped) modes of conferences. For example, 74% of more than 900 researchers surveyed by the journal Nature during the initial phase of the pandemic expressed a desire for virtual conferences to remain in practice even when travel restrictions were eased (Remmel 2021). Other surveys have shown that scientists are highly interested in alternative conference formats due to concerns about climate change (Nursey-Bray et al. 2019; Haage 2020) and access (Niner and Wassermann 2021). These data indicate most researchers have personal circumstances or perspectives that recognize the value of a broader discussion about how conferences and interactions among researchers can be shaped.