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Forest Soils Colleagues,   Just a reminder that the 2010  SSSA International Annual Meeting takes place Oct 31-Nov 4, 2010 in Long Beach, Ca.  Mark your calendars.   The title and abstract submission website will open on Feb 16, 2010 and close on May 4, 2010 so its not too early to start thinking about submitting a paper or poster. This year, an individual may present one volunteer oral presentation per society. This is in addition to any invited presentations they are asked to make.  Individuals may also present an  unlimited number of poster presentations. This appears to be a change in response to complaints from members who felt that they were being denied opportunities to present their work at the meeting if they could only present one poster.  This is another example of the Society leadership listening to the members and making changes.   Starting Feb 16, 2010, submissions can be made on-line at https://www.acsmeetings.org/poster-oral-papers.  As in the past few years,  I assume there will be a fee for submitting a paper or poster.   As in the past, you will have to select a topic area within S7 where you would like to present your volunteer oral paper or poster. These are intended to help organize the program.  The final sessions may have to be modified somewhat. However, below are the topic areas that we have developed for S7 this year. We hope that everyone will be able to fit their work in one of these sessions in either an oral or poster session. You can of course submit papers or posters to other divisions if that is a more appropriate venue for your work.   SA Wilde Lecture (Invited Speaker - Lindsay Rustad is chair of the SA Wilde Committee this year) Forest Soils Graduate Student Poster Session (Poster Session - see below for more details ) Impact of Fire on Forest Soils (Oral) Impact of Fire on Forest Soils (Poster) Nutrient Dynamics in Forest Soils (Oral) Soil Carbon Dynamics (Oral) Soil Carbon and Nutrient Dynamics (Poster) Soil Biology, Roots, Mycorrhizae (Oral) Management Impacts on Forest Soils (Oral) Forest Management and Forest Soils (Poster) Forest, Range, and Wildland Soils (Poster)     Graduate Student Poster Session and Graduate Student Reception In a change to the S7 program this year, we have decided to eliminate the graduate student breakfast.  We are going to substitute a graduate student reception that will accompany the Forest Soils Graduate Student Poster Session listed above. During this discussion session and reception, we plan is to allow each grad student a few minutes to present the highlights of their poster (and their overall research program) to the group. We hope this will foster discussion among individuals and the group.  We will do this in the late afternoon  and in our S7 tradition we  will have a bar available.  We are working to  figure out a way for those students who present a poster in this session to receive a couple of tickets that can be exchanged for beer, wine, soft drinks at the bar. This should be a bit of an incentive for students to participate in this session. Our unscientific survey of grad students at the meeting last year indicates that they appear to prefer the free beer in the afternoon option to the coffee and Danish at 7:00 AM option.  Go figure! In addition to the traditional best paper competition that we have in each session, we are working on some additional awards to grad students who submit posters to this session. We hope to present awards for the top 10 posters.  Stay tuned for more on this session. If you have suggestions on things we can do for grad students in this session, let me know.  Our goal is to have a session where we welcome grad students into S7 and make them feel at home and an important  part of the forest soils community.   Biomass Energy Symposium Series In addition to the volunteer sections listed above, we have organized a symposium series on Biomass Energy Systems that will be joint with S7, S11 and A10. These symposiums will include invited speakers.  Cosponsors for various sessions include C1, C3,  C6, C7, and S6.  There will be five symposium sessions on this topic as follows:   Biomass Energy Systems: Production Systems and Conversion Technology Biomass Energy Systems: Breeding, Genetics and Genomics Biomass Energy Systems: Soil Quality and Sustainability Biomass Energy Systems: Environmental Impact and Water Quality Issues Biomass Energy Systems: Research Needs as Policy Drivers.   Our goal is to put together a comprehensive symposium that addresses both crop and tree biomass production systems in an integrated manner. We hope this will be an series of symposium that attract interest from a cross section of the tri-societies and generate interaction and discussion among members working on different aspects of this general topic.  This is an experiment that to our knowledge has not been done in ASA-CSSA-SSSA before. We hope it will foster discussion and interaction among crops people, soils people and agronomy people.   I'll be in touch with more details about the entire program in the coming weeks and months.   If you have any comments or suggestions, please send them along. In particular, if you think that we need another session for volunteer papers, let me know. We are past the deadline for submitting session topics, but we could probably ask to have another one added if we do it quickly.  As always, the goal is to put together an annual meeting that you find valuable and enjoyable and want to attend.   Cheers   Tom  Fox S7 Chair