College of Forestry

Lynda Mapes

How to talk to the media about your science...and be glad you did

Join veteran journalist and author Lynda Mapes for practical tips useful for graduate students and scientists at any stage of their career on how to get your science out there for greater impact. Radio, newspaper and magazine reporters are eager to get out in the field with you, learn your questions and how you seek to answer them, through scientific inquiry. These can be compelling stories for mainstream audiences that get your work before the public, and helps educate people about science, how it works, and why it matters. This is more important than ever in an age of skepticism and even outright ignorance about science and why it matters. We will talk about how to handle press inquiries, do interviews, and follow up to keep the conversation going.

Lynda V. Mapes specializes in coverage of the environment and Indigenous cultures and governments. Over the course of her 27-year career as a reporter at The Seattle Times she earned numerous awards, including twice winning the international 2019 and 2012 Kavli gold award for science journalism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest professional science association. She and a team of journalists at the Seattle Times were finalists for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. She has written seven books, including most recently The Trees are Speaking, Dispatches from the Salmon Forests just published by the University of Washington Press. She is the winner of the 2021 National Outdoor Book Award, and 2021 Washington State Book Award for non-fiction. She is an associate of the Harvard Forest, and lives in Seattle.

Dr. L. Monika Moskal

Clouds of Points, Mountains of Data: Turning LiDAR into Ecology

This talk presents research on transforming high‑resolution airborne and terrestrial LiDAR point clouds into ecological insights—mapping landscape structure from forests to wetlands, biomass and habitat complexity. I’ll cover workflows for processing massive point datasets, extracting ecologically meaningful metrics, scaling from plot to region, and quantifying uncertainty using a variety of examples from my labs research projects  across western North American ecosystems.

L. Monika Moskal is a Professor of Remote Sensing and Earth Observation in the School of Environmental & Forest Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, and serves as Director of the Program on the Environment. She leads the Remote Sensing & Geospatial Analysis Lab, using hyper‑resolution remote sensing to study ecological landscape structure, function and change.

Interested in presenting?

We invite all early-career OSU-affiliated researchers to submit an abstract if you are interested in presenting. There will be posters and oral sessions available. Preference will be given to graduate and undergraduate students, but postdocs, FRAs, and associated fellows are invited to apply as well. All departments are welcome to participate! More information can be found on the abstract submission page. Please make sure to review our presenter guidelines before submitting an abstract.

If your abstract is accepted, registration for the symposium is still required by March 15th

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: Friday, March 13th, 2026.

Interested in attending?

Registration is now open! The symposium will be held on Friday, April 10^th from 8:00am - 6:00pm in Peavy Forest Science Center. Confluence events begin at 8:00am and continue throughout the afternoon.

Registration is free and open to all. 

Pre-registration includes a free breakfast, lunch, and cocktail hour admission, as well as coffee and snacks throughout the day. 
*Meals will not be available for participants who register day-of.

Faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars are encouraged to sign up as judges for the oral and poster presentations. A judging sign-up option is included on the pre-registration form. 

REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Sunday, March 15th, 2026.