Marleen Stuhr

Being the largest meeting for scientists working in coral reef environments, the ICRS represents the most important opportunity to meet and communicate for researchers, but also politicians and other stakeholders engaged in tropical marine ecosystems. Thus, nearly all well-known scientists in the field were present at the conference, covering topics from social sciences, modeling, geosciences, a large variety of biological areas and chemists to economists. Because the number of participants with about 2500 was still small enough to occasionally meet and the Hawaiian “Aloha” spirit created a warm and very open atmosphere, the symposium gave great chances to get into contact with other junior scientists and equally with experienced scientists. These networking possibilities were further facilitated by the offered workshops, fieldtrips, special lunch meetings and social events throughout the whole week additionally to the lecture and poster sessions (where no free drinks were ever offered, which had the effect that everyone was evenly annoyed about the high beer prices and gave an easy opener into a little chat). I was surprised by the amount of people I met whose publications I had read and worked with throughout the last years, and also very happy to see many former colleagues, teachers and old friends coming together from all over the world.

Over five days, a high diversity of talks included coastal protection, pollution, management approaches, overfishing, ocean acidification, biodiversity studies etc. Unfortunately, there were always about 10 sessions running parallel, so it was often impossible to see every talk I was interested in and compromises had to be made. I nevertheless gained lots of new insights, ideas and could link many studies to my own PhD project.

Probably in response to the current global coral bleaching event, a large majority of the talks in sessions about adaptation and stress responses focused on thermal stress. This was particularly interesting for me, since I presented the results of a temperature stress experiment on large benthic foraminifera. In my presentation, I introduced our optimized proteomics workflow for label-free quantitation of relative changes in protein abundances in response to episodic vs. chronic heat stress. After my talk, several people working on methods to use proteomics on corals and sea anemone contacted me to discuss the method as well as my results. Therefore, I consider the conference successful for the feedback I received, the very valuable scientific discussions on the interpretation of my results as well as for expanding my scientific network, especially with the aim to find a post-doc position next year.

It was an amazing experience to participate and present at the ICRS 2016 and I am highly grateful to GLOMAR and the DAAD for supporting this conference trip. It allowed me to strengthen my scientific network, get valuable input from other researchers in my field, exchange results and improve my own research. Moreover, it boosted my motivation as I am already looking forward to the next ICRS in 2020, where I will hopefully have the chance to participate again!