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Horticulture industry steps up
Organizing the presentations
Lopez said planning the light symposium and preparing the written proceedings that accompany it are very time consuming. “There is a lot of speculation as to what the conference is going to cost and how many people are going to attend,” he said. “As hosts we take on the financial burden because we really don’t know what the attendance will be. Erik and I anticipated 200-300 participants based on the previous symposium that was held in the Netherlands in 2012.” Lopez said they received financial support from 25 industry companies. “There were different categories of sponsorship, including three prime sponsors for the symposium’s opening reception, banquet and tours. There were three additional levels of sponsorship, platinum, gold and silver. Sponsoring companies included many of the leading plant light companies, plant breeding companies, distributors, an industry association and the trade press. “The sponsors were recognized on the light symposium’s website, as well as banners that were hung in different locations during the symposium. The sponsors received a lot of exposure and those at the prime and platinum levels had vendor booths that featured product information and samples. Because of the sponsors’ financial support, we were able to lower the cost of the registration fee for attendees. We were also able to subsidize the graduate student registration cost.” There were 35 graduate students who presented both oral and poster sessions. The students came from several different countries. “We also had a graduate student poster competition,” Lopez said. “Three winners were awarded. There were three judges, all representatives from academia in the U.S., Europe and Japan. The poster winners were awarded certificates and monetary awards provided by a sponsor company.”
Lopez said he and Runkle began accepting abstracts from potential symposium presenters in Feb. 2015. “There is a scientific committee that consists of 39 people, most of whom have a PhD. or are working toward a PhD.,” he said. “Over 90 percent of the committee members are from academia, but there are also industry members. “We had a call for abstracts so people would submit an abstract based on the research they wanted to present. Participants who submitted abstracts indicated whether they wanted to do an oral or poster presentation. The scientific committee members reviewed the abstracts. Often times we had to send them back because there was definitely a language barrier in some cases. Often times some researchers needed help with the English translation. A lot of the researchers wanted to do oral presentations, but unfortunately there wasn’t enough time during the symposium.” Lopez said committee members decided that some of the abstracts were more appropriate as posters than as oral presentations. There were 52 oral presentations and 78 poster presentations. “We created 11 different oral sessions and within those sessions we tried our best to place the presentations appropriately under those titles,” he said. “The largest session was on light quality and optimization. There were an equal number of U.S. and European presenters in that session. “The next largest session was supplemental lighting of vegetable crops. That one had research presenters mostly from Canada and Europe. No U.S. researchers did presentations in that session. Light for ornamental crops and sole-source lighting of vegetable crops were the next largest sessions.”