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Giovanni Sanna
Report of GLOMAR PhD student Giovanni Sanna about his participation in the ICRS Conference 2021 – Virtual Symposium from 19 - 23 July 2021
From the 19th to the 23rd of July, I took part in the 14th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS 2021), organized by the University of Bremen, in its first virtual edition. I was one of the 1300 participants and I presented the first study of my PhD project, concerning the morphological diversity of the reef-building cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa, in Theme 5 (“Cold-water and temperate reefs”) of the conference programme.
We had the opportunity to access the conference online portal already at the end of the week preceding the conference (perks of virtual conferences…), to take a look at the numerous pre-recorded presentations and e-posters that were going to be later streamed during the live sessions. I took advantage of this and got a glimpse of some of the posters I was interested in (and even a few talks). Moreover, e-posters and talks are accessible to the attendees up to one year after the conference. I will certainly make use of this chance to watch talks that I did not manage to follow during the conference week.
My focus was mainly on Theme 5, but I also learned about interesting experimental approaches to study coral morphological and physiological plasticity, applied to tropical corals and discussed in other sessions. Despite a few technical difficulties (understandable in this relatively new format), it was a quite pleasant experience both as a presenter and as a spectator. From the presenter’s perspective, I believe this format allowed a more relaxed atmosphere than a traditional live conference. I would like to thank GLOMAR for supporting my participation in the ICRS 2021.
