Nitrogen 2007

Nitrogen is an essential component of any plan for reducing world hunger, poverty, and disease. When used in excess, however, N becomes an important pollutant. This duality it one of the major challenges that humanity has to face now and in the future if we want to ensure environmental sustainability. The complex problems of N cannot be tackled individually, but rather the solutions must engage a large community that encompasses a broad spectrum of professionals. For N2007, we are inviting not only participants concerned with particular aspects of N cycling, but also participants from the policy, development, and engineering communities. The N2007 meeting is the perfect venue to discuss these issues and to find common ground to begin to find answers and solutions to alleviate world hunger with minimal environmental harm. N-2007 will build an agenda for how to better manage nitrogen across our planet. We will develop some specific goals to reach by 2025, set in the context of the goals of the United Nations Millennium Development Program. To achieve these goals, we will use a mixture of plenary lectures, short workshops, contributed talks sections, panels and short course for students.

Plenary lectures: The plenary lectures will be used to inspire and challenge the participants in the meeting by covering a wide range of themes related to nitrogen. A select team of speakers will present a total of 13 plenary talks that will address nitrogen-related issues from ecosystem functioning to international trade, and to hunger in the planet.

Workshops: The main objective of these six-hour workshops will be to discuss topics that would lead to the development of an agenda (or a program) to promote the sustainable use of nitrogen. The final product of each workshop will be a document summarizing the conclusions from each workshop.

Workshop coordinators will prepare a brief statement describing the goals for each particular workshop, including possible questions for group discussions. These statements will be posted in the conference’s webpage three months prior to the meeting in order to allow the conference attendees to review the materials and choose the workshop they would like to attend.

Contributed talks: In these sections ,presentations about related topics will be grouped by the coordinators in charge. A brief document describing the goals of each section will be posted in the conference’s website. We hope to accommodate every presentation as oral. However, this will depend on the number of submissions.

Panels: The main objective of the panels will be to integrate and summarize the findings from the workshops, and from the contributed talks. The panelists will be responsible for producing a document containing the conclusions from the workshops and contributed talks.