I’m back from a couple of conferences: the ESEB meeting in Groningen and the SIBE meeting in Rome.

Both were terrific, and both allowed me to come back home with the usual mix of excitement (for the impressive amount of good science that people do, and for the truckload of good ideas I could grab) and frustration (for not having done myself all that good science!).

Among other things, I must stress the feeling of being (at 47) among the eldest at both conferences – and this is a very positive remark: of course, one gets older and thus climbs the pyramid of ages, but I reckon that evolutionary biology conference-goers are, on average, pretty young and impressively competent. This spells good for the future of evolutionary biology!

Yet, I’ve been wondering throughout both conferences where all my fellow forest evolutionary biologists were hiding. Certainly, those two conferences do not focus on forests, but they do not focus on fruit flies and mice either, and I’ve been hearing plenty of talks on those critters. For sure, forest trees are not “model” species, but the share taken by model species at both conferences was, globally, very small, so there must not have been a “filter” against papers on trees. The fact is, there were very few forests across the conference landscape. Somehow, I felt slightly lonely with my forest population genetics talks and posters.

Yet – although I’ll provide no list, for fear of omitting somebody – I know plenty of forest scientists having provided major contributions to asking and answering overarching (*) evolutionary questions and to developing evolutionary theory: evolutionary biology is a relevant playground for forest geneticists. So why was I so lonely? Why the attendance of forest geneticists, young and old, to general conferences is decreasing? Are they all busy tending to their science, with nothing worth sharing in their hand? Or is their budget, both in terms of time and money, decreasing so abruptly that they cannot afford those meetings any more? Or maybe they are folding back on their community?

To check, I had a look at the program of the IUFRO general meeting, that will be held in Freiburg next week – IUFRO is the United Nations of forestry research, every forest scientist goes to a IUFRO meeting every so often. And even there, although I have carefully scrolled all symposia and checked speaker lists, I could barely find the names of acclaimed and less known forest geneticists. Essentially, our research field will not be represented there, either (well, I confess: I am not attending, but I could not go to three conferences in less than a month).

Forest geneticists are deserting both general evolution / evolutionary genetics events and forest-focused meetings. Why? And – apart from forest genetics conferences – where do they go? I’d very much like to know the answers to those questions. Plus, I would like to say that it is very important, for junior and senior scientists alike, to get out of our “comfort zone”, and mix with people doing (relatively speaking) entirely different things. As I said above, one comes home with his suitcase full of great ideas.

(*) It is good to fit the word overarching into a text, from time to time. It makes you feel important.