Archbold was host to 44 meetings and conferences during 1999-00 with 1,078 participants (see Appendix H); these are similar numbers to the preceding 2 years. Some are convened by government agencies such as the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Non-profit groups, such as The Nature Conservancy (who held volunteer training sessions at Archbold) organize other meetings. Many groups use Archbold as a regular venue, such as the annual Florida Ecological and Evolutionary Symposium (7^th -1999; 8^th -2000), which draws graduate students from Florida state and private universities for presentations highlighting their research.

NEON. The largest, and logistically most demanding meeting of the biennial was a 9-12 January 2000 workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide input for the proposed National Ecological Observatory Network or NEON <http://www.archbold-station.org/abs/neon/index.html>. The meeting assembled eminent ecologists from throughout North America to discuss objectives for a geographically dispersed state-of-the-art national facility for field biologists to conduct research spanning all levels of biological organization and across broad temporal and spatial scales. NSF anticipates NEON sites will be chosen via competitive proposals from consortia involving field stations and/or marine laboratories, Long-Term Ecological Research sites, universities and colleges, and natural history archives. Thirty participants (see photo, below) <http://www.archbold-station.org/abs/neon/broadcast/participants.html> from many different disciplines in field biology, reviewed NEON objectives including connecting geographically distributed parts into one virtual installation via communication networks so that members of the field biology research community can access the facility remotely, and facilitating predictive modeling of biological systems via data sharing and synthesis efforts by users. Sections of the meeting were broadcast as live streaming audio via the Internet and a final report was produced for NSF.

Project FIRST. Another series of workshops sponsored by NSF during the Biennial was the faculty teaching enhancement program, Project FIRST <http://www.archbold-station.org/abs/first/index.html>. This project, directed by Jan Hodder (Oregon Inst. Marine Biol.), and Diane Ebert-May (Michigan State Univ.), involved five field stations nationwide including Archbold. Co-organized at Archbold by Hilary Swain and Mark Deyrup and in conjunction with Janice Easton (Univ. Florida grad. student), the project involved 16 faculty members from 5 Florida institutions (Edison Community Coll., Florida International Univ., Stetson Univ., Univ. Florida, Univ. South Florida). We held two workshops (see photo, this page) and developed Web pages and other supporting material to build this coalition of Florida institutions and to support a regional network of faculty and staff committed to enhancing undergraduate teaching. The workshops used Archbold’s facilities, in conjunction with explorations of teaching methods, to increase participant's understanding of Florida ecosystems, and to enhance faculty’s ability to convey complex concepts in field biology to undergraduates. The group developed inquiry-based, field exercises that can be incorporated into many courses. Project FIRST, like all meetings/conferences at Archbold, encourages interest in using field studies and field sites, such as the Station and the Ranch, as teaching and research forums, and promotes general interest in Florida ecosystems and species.