The BG division is extremely excited about including campfire events in our regular program. Campfires are informal events where we would like to bring together the biogeosciences community to discuss, learn or implement new ideas. To do so, we first wanted to know what the hottest topics are that interest our members.
We celebrated the first BG campfire event last May 27th. It was an exciting meeting with more than 20 participants. We also invited the ECS Representative team of the Soil Science Division, who had previously organized several campfire events, to guide us in this new experience.
The aim of this first BG Campfire was to organize a brainstorming session with different members of our community to shape the topics of the future BG Campfire events. Indeed, it was a fantastic (virtual) meeting where we saw old friends but we also met lots of new people!
The majority of the participants were early-career scientists (47% PhD candidates and 13% postdocs) but some research scientists and professors also attended the event, having a good representation of all academic stages of the BG community (Figure 1).
After a brief introduction by the BG president and the new ECS representative team, we had a lively discussion in small break-out rooms. The groups and discussions were very diverse and changed a lot from room to room, which resulted in a wide variety of topics that we summarized in figure 2.
Figure 2. Summary of the main subjects for the following campfires.
The main areas were: scientific exchange, scientific workshops, career development, community-building events, and work/life balance.
We want to thank all the participants for their amazing ideas! After the summer break, we will post the schedule of the campfire agenda for the following months.
