Latest news, accommodation details and practicals.

We are looking forward to meet you in Prague! Before our meeting, you may find this document useful. In it you will find details about the venue, transport, accommodation, lunches, posters and more! we would like to draw you attention to some final details:

1. For those of you with your accommodation supported by PAGES, you can see your accommodation assignation here. We however advice you to come first to the reception desk on Wednesday 1st at 1pm so we give you all the needed information to get there and will update the room numbers if necessary. In addition, at this welcoming desk we will provide you with a public transport ticket, valid for three days, for you to connect between the conference venue and the accommodation area (ca. 45′ by transport, all details are in the previous section document).

2. We have finalized now the workshop assignation, see here. The Chronology and Tilia workshops will run only once (Thursday and Friday respectively). You will be contacted by the workshop organizer in case anything is required before the conference. Please note that all workshops require you having your own laptop and for most you need to have R and R-Studio installed. If you are interested in following the Tilia workshop note that this is a windows program and can only be installed on a Windows PC or Windows emulator.

3. If you are presenting a poster, remember to prepare one single slide summarizing it and be ready to give a 1minute flash talk of it. You will have to hand out this slide at the welcoming desk on Wednesday the 1st from 1 to 2pm.

4. During the poster session we invite you to bring sweets and snacks or drinks typical from your country of origin to share with the rest of us.

5. Those of you attending the BBQ on Friday, be ready to pay at the welcoming desk (either in CZK or EUR) from 5 to 10€ to cover the food costs – there is not a fixed amount and we leave it to your own appetite 🙂 Drinks can be bought on location.

6. Here you have some additional information regarding where to eat, nightlife and public transport over night.

What is this meeting about?

We are excited to invite you to an in person Open Science Meeting in Prague between the 1st and 3rd of June 2022. With this meeting we aim to maintain and foster the community of palaeoecologists using the EPD and Neotoma for data storage and analysis. Therefore, we like to  bring together palynologists and researchers using different proxies that may be archived in Neotoma (macrofossils, sedaDNA, charcoal, geochemistry, isotopes).  

We are preparing exciting three days filled with interesting keynotes, workshops and discussions. Attendants will have the opportunity to showcase their research during a poster session with a short plenary oral highlight of the main finds. We have some social events such as an open-air barbecue, and an art and science tour.  The venue will be the Faculty of Science of the beautiful Charles University in Prague.

Please note that we will only have a live meeting if the Covid situation allows us to meet in person in Prague and will cancel otherwise. Please organize your travel arrangements accordingly. 

Registration is now closed, deadline for registration was 1st of May 2022. Should you have any questions, please write an email to:

michelle.leydet@univ-amu.fr

We strongly recommend participants to register but attendance will be possible with no previous registration. In the later case, joining a workshop will only be possible if there is still space and booking accommodation through the EPD organizing committee will not longer be possible.

1. Program

To explore the most updated program, please click here.

2. Confirmed speakers 

• Jack Williams “Why Neotoma?  Supporting Science at Local to Global Scales”
• Danielle Schreve “Move, adapt or die: Late Pleistocene and early Holocene vertebrate datasets from Britain.”
• Jan Kolář: “Plants or humans of the past? Do we really need to choose what to study?”
• Elizabeth Dietze: “The future of the Global Paleofire Database”.
• Kasia Marcisz: “Testate amoebae in multi-proxy palaeoecological studies”
• Cindy De Jonge: “Biomarker lipids as temperature proxies: what are global calibrations hiding?”
• Inger Greve Alsos “High taxonomic resolution of sedimentary ancient DNA allows detailed reconstruction of postglacial species arrival and ecosystem build-up”
• Leeli Amon: “The last deglaciation and local-scale vegetation dynamics”
• Thomas Giesecke (you can also check here) “Introduction and historical perspectives of the EPD”
• Ulrike Herzschuh “Sedimentary ancient DNA – from population to ecosystem-level reconstructions”
• Patrik Mráz: “Herbarium collections as a tool for tracking global change“
• Heikki Seppä: “Identifying problems using continental-scale modern pollen databases for climate reconstructions”

3. Workshops

(Each participant can attend two workshops)

1. Chronology-building using the EPD by Petr Kuneš and Graciela Gil-Romera.    
2. Tilia: individual sites and data upload by Michelle Leydet and Graciela Gil-Romera.
3. Quantitative land-cover reconstructions by Martin Theuerkauf and Vojtěch Abraham.
4. Neotoma R by Socorro Domínguez.   
5. Non Pollen Palynomorphs by Lyudmila Shumilovskikh.
6. CharAnalysis for R by Walter Finsinger. 
7. An introduction to quantitative climate reconstructions in R  by Basil Davies.

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