The Scientific Committee will group oral presentations by theme into sessions. These provide authors the opportunity to present original work related to conference or symposium topics. Authors whose oral presentations do not generally meet these topics will be grouped together into a general session.

Oral presentations will occur in 15-min time slots, and presenters should aim for a 12-min talk and 3-min for questions from the audience (unless part of a symposium with a scheduled talk of 30-min). Given that we will be running concurrent sessions we will be strict with the start and finish time for each talk, so that attendees can move freely from one room to the next without interrupting the talk. If a presenter exceeds the 12 minutes of his/her talk, there will be no questions from the audience. If a presenter exceeds the 15-min presentation limit, the moderator will cut off the speaker and continue with the next talk in the program.

Presenters should use PowerPoint (.ppt or .pptx) or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) to prepare their presentations. We encourage presenters to give their talks in English, but talks in Spanish and Portuguese will also be accepted. Presentations in English should have slides in one of the other two languages of the meeting, Spanish or Portuguese. The same goes for presentations in Portuguese (either English or Spanish) and Spanish (either English or Portuguese). Please check in later for volunteers that will help with this process.

There are many guidelines for good presentations that can be found online. In general, we suggest the following:

  1. If possible, try to avoid slide animation
  2. Embed all video and audio files in your talk (do not rely on internet access for these)
  3. Use a light-colored background
  4. Color blindness is common, so please avoid red-green and blue-yellow color combinations when you prepare your slides
  5. Keep in mind the target audience of your talk
  6. Scientific names for bird species should be given at least once at the beginning of your talk.

Each presentation room will have a laptop and projecting system for presentations. We will also have a preview room set up for viewing slideshow presentations on the same software system as that used in the presentation rooms. If you are uncertain about whether your presentation will work properly on a computer other than your own, check the slides in the preview room and modify them as necessary. All presentations will have to be uploaded on the laptop computer of the room assigned to your talk the day before the talk. Check in later for information regarding this process.
Symposium talks should follow these same guidelines.