What I Learned from Moderating a Session at Northeast Natural History Conference

Blog by Sterling Student, Sarah Tutt, September 2025

Sterling Student, Sarah Tutt and Sterling Faculty, Gustavo Requena Santos at the 2025 Northeast Natural History Conference

The Northeast Natural History Conference (NENHC) this year was hosted in Springfield, Massachusetts, and organized by the Eagle Hill Institute. The conference was first started in 1998 and has been hosted in various northeast cities every year since 2011. The goal of the conference is to “facilitate effective networking among participants for researchers, field biologists, natural resource managers, faculty members and their students, and naturalists—who shares the vision of developing an expanded true regional forum for exchanging information on all aspects of the natural history sciences of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada”. This year I worked with Sterling Faculty in Ecology, Gustavo Requena Santos to moderate a session with a theme of freshwater ecosystems.

Organizing The Session

We began work towards the end of winter break in January, when I contacted Gustavo after he sent out an email about the event. I thought that it would be a great opportunity to increase my knowledge of the various ecological organizations and studies being done in the Northeastern United States. I also wanted a chance to increase my networking, communication, and organization skills. I’m hoping to work in ecology, particularly freshwater ecosystem restoration, in the future, so this event seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn more about the field. In our first meeting Gustavo and I discussed what type of session we wanted to set up, and agreed to have a theme of Freshwater Ecosystem Restoration and a format of a discussion panel. I submitted a proposal to the conference organizers and got started looking for people to invite to present at our session.

This is when I started to realize how difficult this would be. Class had started the week after I sent out the proposal and we had only a week to send out invitations before the deadline. Gustavo and I discussed whether we wanted to continue trying to get this set up, since the timeline was so short. We decided to contact the conference organizer to ask for an extension, explaining to him that the semester had just started and we didn’t have time to start sending out invitations until now. The organizer gave us another week of breathing room and I got to work looking for people experienced in freshwater ecology who might want to present.

 I didn’t really know where to start. I’m an undergraduate student who hasn’t studied in this field for very long and who has little to no connections. I asked ecology professors to put out feelers among their contacts and started going through the ecology departments of as many colleges and non-profit organizations as I could think of. At the end of the week I had sent out twelve invitations and had only heard back from six, five of whom had said they couldn’t do it. The one person who had agreed, Declan McCabe, is a Professor of Biology at Saint Michael’s College, and had been contacted by Gustavo for a different session at NENHC in 2020, which had been canceled because of COVID-19. It was honestly very discouraging to only have one person sign up to our session by the deadline. I was sure that we would have to cancel the session and started looking into other ways that I could volunteer at the conference. I was determined to go to the conference no matter what; I couldn’t lose this opportunity.

Thankfully, when we told the organizer that we only had one person signed up, he informed us that there were some people with freshwater related presentations that hadn’t been assigned to a session yet, and asked if we wanted to change our theme to include all freshwater ecology. I agreed and worked out a new title, this time “Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems”. Our two wildcard presentations were “Implications of Chloride Concentrations in the Major Tributaries of the Merrimack Watershed During the Drought of 2024” by Peter Severance of RiverMerrimack, and “Metacercarial Cyst Presence from Digenetic Trematodes on Teleost Species in the Genesee River Watershed” by William Tormey of Houghton University. After getting their contact information from the organizer, I sent out an email introducing myself but didn’t get an answer. I would be meeting my presenters the day of the session, and wasn’t sure if they would be okay with following the panel format.

The Conference

The day of the conference I got up bright and early at my parents house near Amherst and drove an hour to arrive in Springfield at 7:30am. I got the lay of the land, what room our presentations would be, what my responsibilities were and what I could get help with. I was in charge of introducing the presenters and keeping them on time, letting them know when they had 5 and 1 minute left. I chatted for a good while with a person who was selling ecological inspired puzzles, debating the morals of blue jays. I also perused the program to see what presentation topics I was interested in. We were free to move between rooms during presentations, and I took advantage of this to learn about a variety of topics. The session I would facilitate was in the afternoon so I used my spare time to listen and take notes.

At 8:30am I sat down to learn about various studies done as a part of the Hudson Valley Farm Hub. The farm has a few acres dedicated to research with a plot to grow wild flowers and grasses using curated seed mixes made by Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) member Kelly Gill. The area is open for research by any graduate students or universities in the area. These plots have been used to study insect and invertebrate communities, evolution of plant communities, soil microbial diversity, water quality, reptiles, and birds. From these talks I learned how seeding native plants can increase the biodiversity of non-seeded native plants in the area. How insects of the groups Ephemeroptera (mayflies), Plecoptera (stoneflies), and Tricoptera (caddisflies) (known as EPT macroinvertebrate bioindicators) can indicate water quality, while different types of invertebrate abundance in soils can help indicate soil quality. I also learned of various organizations that were working in the Hudson Valley area: SUNY ESF, Bard College, Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, University of New England, and many more. Learning about the diversity of organizations in the Northeast and what they were studying and working on was probably one of the most valuable parts of going to the conference. Hundreds of organizations worked together on the projects presented in this conference and while the conference itself gives me a glimpse at this, the Abstracts Catalogue contains an incredible amount of information that I will be using in the future when job searching.

Along with oral presentations, there were poster presentations, which gave an opportunity for many undergraduate and graduate students to share their work. I enjoyed the opportunity these sessions gave me to talk one-on-one with the presenters and ask them questions. I was also able to see many more posters than presentations, so it was a good way to increase my variety of knowledge. I had one memorable conversation with ecologist Erin Hilley who works at Camp Edwards, a military training site, who talked about how the combination of unmaintained land and regular small disturbances from training sessions had lead to the area becoming a safe haven for several rare and endangered species such as Papillose Nut-sedge (Scleria pauciflora). We discussed how in some cases regular disturbance is required to conserve a species, which goes against the common mentality that conservation means no human intervention.    

I learned a bit about the various people who would be presenting in my panel by reading their abstracts. I made sure to have a written introduction so I could open the session and in this introduction I explained that after the presentations we had around 20 minutes of free time for a Q&A, and asked if the presenters would be open to using this time for a joint discussion. The first person to talk was Peter Severance, a water ecologist who discussed how the times of highest salt concentration in the Merrimack watershed was during summer and fall, which I was surprised by because the majority of road salting happens in winter and spring. He explained that the salt levels were so high then because the water levels in streams decreased  due to weather patterns, so there was more salt per gallon of water. He also discussed the difficulty in finding a solution to our salt pollution problem, as in many places salt drastically decreases road accidents, and alternatives to road salt like road sand can cause sand deposits in rivers and lead to erosion.

The second presenter was William Tormey, a grad student with a passion for fish in the Genesee River. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this presentation, I had never really had an interest in fish or parasitic worms, but the enthusiasm and easily digestible explanations of the presenter made this one of the best talks I had gone to that day. I learned about the role that aquatic snails and birds play in a parasite's life cycle and how the shape of a river can affect the number of infected fish. Finally, from Declan McCabe I got to see a professor’s perspective on undergraduate’s small studies. He discussed how in many studies it can be difficult to get a large amount of data, which decreases our certainty of its significance, but he encourages his students to think out of the box. No data is useless data, because it tells a story that can be used to inform future studies. 

After the presentations I hosted the discussion session, which was a relaxed environment. I asked all of the presenters questions that dove deeper into the implications of their work and how their different studies may connect with one another. We discussed how many ecological problems are systemic, road salt is used by state and federal transportation offices, pollution of rivers by chloride and phosphorus can cause fish to be more susceptible to parasites, and a lack of funding for small scale studies leads to less time and resources for data gathering. Peter Severance and Declan McCabe concluded that we would need to fundamentally change the way that water is managed for many harms to freshwater ecosystems to be prevented. 

After the session was over I got a bit of a break until dinner that night, which was sorely needed after a full day of learning and talking with people. I needed the down time to recharge and reflect, so I could be ready to talk with people during the networking dinner that the conference organizers were holding. At the table I was eating there was a group of birders, one of which was Jordan O'Hare Gibson, who had recently published an an opinion piece in Birding Magazine entitled “Lifers, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Securing the Right to Bird" about the recent surge of changes for the official common names for bird species by Audubon. The name changes were due to the birds being named after people who were sexist, racist, or otherwise prejudiced against marginalized groups. We discussed the pushback against these changes and why people feel so strongly about species names. It was interesting to hear the perspectives of several experts in the field. The next day at lunch I also had a talk with a Florida University archivist about the recent cuts in government funding, and the effect that was having on so many of her friends and colleagues' job stability. These conferences are a place for like-minded people to come together and discuss the good and the bad, breakthroughs and challenges, which I found valuable to see first hand.

Overall, organizing a session and participating in this conference was stressful, draining, uncomfortable, and one of the best experiences I’ve had in my academic career. I’ve learned that being open to talking, actively asking questions, and taking advantage of the connections you have are some of the most important parts of learning and growing. These are things that I find super hard to do because I’m an introvert, but I always benefit from reaching out. I believe that the skills I gained, the organizations I learned about, and the people I met in this conference will be invaluable to my future academic and scientific career, and I am so happy that I had the opportunity to go.