We are coming up on to our 16th Upper Mississippi River Conference with the main theme being centered around our changing climate and the evolving river. We are tremendously excited to hear from every single panelist, plenary, and key-note speaker. Each presenter has their own unique topic that will explain their role when it comes to climate change and the Mississippi River. The conference will be on October 19th and 20th at the Stoney Creek Inn, in Moline IL. You can find out more information on our website, riveraction.org/umrc
Our first speaker of the day will be our Key-note presentation, which will be coming from Ray Wolf, the Quad Cities Science and Operations Officer for NOAA. He will be talking about the overall picture of climate change and how it is affecting the Upper Mississippi River Basin. This presentation will be a great start to the conference. With that insightful keynote, we will than go into our first breakout session including two tracks: Private and Public Sectors and Climate Change in the Mississippi River. These two tracks will have presentations organizations such as Iowa Environmental Council, 1Mississippi, the Great Lakes & Upper Mississippi River National Audubon Society, USDA – Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy in Iowa.
We will than continue the day with two field trips, or an in-house option. We end our first conference day with a student poster session, followed by catered dinner with a special featured presentation from Art Cullen, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and the editor of the Storm Lake Times.
Our last day of the conference opens with a plenary speaker session from John Delaney, a biologist at USGS who will be mapping out climate change vulnerability and identifying adaption opportunities. Which will be followed by our next break out session including 2 tracks: Climate Action Plans from Public and Private sectors. The presentation will be done from Graef, Village of Oak Park, City of Iowa City, MidAmerican, and John Deere. The session ends right before our luncheon, with another featured presentation from Bill Becker, an author and executive direction of the Presidential Climate Action Project.
Our last breakout session will be examining climate problems through research and media exposure. Our research track will include presentations from 4 professors, coming from Iowa State, University of Iowa, University of Western Illinois, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Our media track will include talks from Iowa Public Radio and Along the Mississippi.
We are so excited to end our conference with our first even student panel, which we are calling a Youth’s Call to Action. More information will be posted on all our social media pages and again, on the website. Reserve your ticket now, as early bird pricing ends October 1st. We hope to see you all there.