By Olivia Rahn, PhD candidate at McGill University

Back in 2023, during my first year as a PhD student, I had the opportunity to travel to my first ever in-person conference: Species on the Move in Bonita Springs, Florida. In retrospect, Species on the Move perhaps set the bar too high as my first “real” conference – almost every talk title sounded relevant to my research, it was small enough that networking felt natural, and I left with tons of new ideas, many of which informed my future thesis chapters. We also saw lots of Florida nature and wildlife… 

… went wading through a swamp (unfortunately not pictured here), and I got to see a lot of my friends present their work.

Species on the Move is what comes to mind when I think about a conference that is truly worth travelling for.

Given that, I’ve started thinking about the next Species on the Move in 2026, which is taking place at Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan. I’m now much further along in my PhD than I was in 2023 and hoping to graduate sometime in the next year or so, which prompts some thoughts about how much more equipped I now feel as a researcher! It has also, in all honesty, prompted me to remember that I never wrote a blog post about the 2023 rendition of Species on the Move. Here, I hope to reflect a bit about what I learned at the last Species on the Move and what I think will be different about the next one. 

Prior to Species on the Move in 2023, I had never given a talk before, never travelled for a conference, and was still coming up with the ideas that would eventually form my thesis. Understandably I was very nervous for my talk and practiced a lot. That actually hasn’t changed too much – I still practice my talks quite a bit and have realized I will probably never be the person who just wings it, but I certainly feel less nervous. 

At the time, I was also coming from a fieldwork-heavy background but was interested in diving more into macroecology and computational approaches to studying ecology. I was intimidated by the methods I heard people talk about at Species on the Move, and didn’t really know how to get started with learning them. I was also feeling conflicted about working on a singular study system, which is what I had been doing up until that point for my thesis. It seemed like at least at Species on the Move, the studies getting the most attention were global data syntheses that involved many species and thousands of data points. Despite being slightly panicked by this at the time (do I need to do that?), I now truly feel like I’ve had time in my PhD to explore a lot of different approaches to studying ecology, including many computational ones. I’ve learned to dive into learning new skills and concepts without worrying too much about their difficulty, instead feeling confident that I am capable of learning them. 

While learning these skills, I’ve been able to see the unique value in all types and scales of ecology studies. I’ve gotten the chance to work with bigger datasets and spatial scales, which is great for generalization but often leaves me worrying that I’m missing some important details. For other parts of my thesis, I’ve continued working with a singular species (the annual plant Rhinanthus minor) whose natural history, habitat and life cycle I really understand. With this work, I’m not usually worried that I’m missing information, but sometimes I wonder how much the trends we are seeing are applicable to other systems. In this way, being able to zoom in and out in terms of spatial and taxonomic scope has taught me much more than sticking to one scale ever could have. 

At Species on the Move 2026, I’m excited to present new research and see what other people have been working on for the past 3 years, this time with more confidence and surefootedness than I had during the last Species on the Move! It will likely be my last conference before I graduate, and I can’t think of a better one to finish my degree with. 

About the author:

Olivia is a PhD candidate at McGill University, supervised by Anna Hargreaves. She studies the causes of species geographic range limits, often using the annual plant Rhinanthus minor as a study system.