Alongside our usual topics for contributed talks sessions, we will include several new Special Topics for the 2026 Annual Meeting in Sacramento. When submitting an abstract for an oral presentation, consider whether your work might be a good match for one of these organized sessions of contributed talks. All are welcome to submit abstracts for consideration in any of these special topic sessions.
SPECIAL TOPICS FOR CONTRIBUTED TALKS
Student Success in STEM
Overview: As science, higher education, and the identities of many students and researchers face increasing attacks from political forces and their economic interests, students in STEM are navigating unprecedented levels of burnout, anxiety, uncertainty, and mental health strain. In this moment, fostering strong communities of care, democratic organization, peer mentorship, and collective support within academic and research environments has never been more critical. This session centers initiatives, actions, and other means of building community, belonging, and resilience for students during a time of profound institutional challenge.
Eligible presenters: This session seeks a balance of presentations from both students and faculty involved in efforts to strengthen community and belonging within academic and scientific spaces. Both undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and support staff/scientists are encouraged to submit abstracts about their student success programs and initiatives.
Presentation details: Presenters may choose a 5 minute lightning talk or 15 minute full presentation format. Presenters may share innovative approaches to collaborative field and lab practices, peer mentorship models, science communication, research methods or programs that build support networks across cohorts, labs, departments, campuses, and throughout the coastal region. Presenters are encouraged to highlight how they are integrating these efforts directly into their research and/or their development as a scientific professional in an academic environment. Presenters (student presenters especially) are encouraged to share experiences and best practices for navigating research and academia. Talks can discuss how meaningful mentor and peer relationships in the lab are cultivated, how to foster stronger senses of place within their departments and marine/field labs, and how to build a resilient community of researchers for the next generation of scientific leaders.
Moving Beyond ‘Implications for Management’: How to work with decision makers to make your science truly policy-relevant
Members of the WSN community are increasingly interested in conducting work that can inform management. Unfortunately, it is often difficult for both early career and experienced scientists to develop research questions that are applicable to management and then ensure that research findings can be used by decision makers. Simply stating ‘these findings have implications for management’ is rarely enough. For this session, we will take advantage of being in Sacramento, the state capital, to highlight the importance of applied research. We will feature researchers and staff from academic institutions and agencies who have collaborated to generate management-relevant information and then used that information for decision making. They will present a range of examples of how to create effective policy-relevant collaborations, from question generation to dissemination of results to incorporation into policy.
Advancing the Use of Autonomous Systems and Machine Learning in the Marine Sciences
This session will focus on the use of autonomous systems such as drones, gliders, AUVs and other uncrewed systems to collect data to improve our understanding of the marine environment. The session will also highlight speakers who are using machine learning tools, such as neural networks, to analyze the large volumes of data that autonomous systems collect. Our goal is for attendees to come away from the session with an understanding of how these tools are used in marine research, and how they might be integrated with existing methods for collecting and analyzing data from the marine environment. Additionally, the session will highlight the new questions and avenues of research in marine systems that autonomous systems and machine learning present. The session is open to marine researchers and educators who are working in the research and teaching spaces focused on the use of autonomous systems and machine learning tools.
Unlocking the Potential of California’s Marine Protected Area Network
As California moves toward the next Decadal Management Review, assessing MPA performance remains a priority. However, there is also an emerging need to turn long-term ecological monitoring data into an active tool for tracking ocean change and informing broader assessment and management of marine ecosystems. This special session highlights multi-dimensional research advancing Decadal Management Review priorities to showcase California’s MPA Network as critical climate adaptation infrastructure. We will explore how core nearshore monitoring acts as a vital coastal reference network and ecological bridge, linking data insights from coastal watersheds out to deep offshore oceanographic surveys. There is a critical need to leverage this core monitoring data to track climate impacts, predict ecosystem shifts, and directly integrate into climate-ready fisheries management. To do this, the session examines how incorporating outside influencing factors—such as human dimensions, multiple environmental stressors, and specific MPA attributes—can better isolate fishing effects from broad-scale oceanographic change. We will also explore how advanced technologies (e.g., eDNA, predictive models), Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and community science can enhance and scale traditional assessments. Ultimately, we demonstrate how fulfilling Decadal Management Review priorities relies on robust ecological data to unlock the Network’s full potential as a predictive, solutions-based asset for adaptive ocean governance.