The fifth Students in Polar and Alpine Research Conference (SPARC) will be held at the Department of Geography, Masaryk University in Brno 4-6 April 2019.

Students or early-career scientist working within the field of geo-/biosciences in polar and alpine environments are encouraged to submit an abstract along with the registration form in order to discuss their research within this fast-growing community.

PROGRAMME
The first two days, 4 April and 5 April, are reserved for oral presentations. The poster session will be organized on 5 April in the afternoon. Every half-day section of presentations will start with an invited lecture. On the last day of the conference, 6 April, an optional half-day excursion to the surroundings of Brno will be held.

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE
The conference is free of charge for all participants. The official language of the conference is English and all the contributions should be presented in English. The first author of each contribution must be a student or early-career scientist (less than 3 years after the PhD defence). The organisers reserve the right to reject any contribution that does not fulfil this rule.

ORAL PRESENTATION
Presentations from any discipline within the field of geo- and biosciences are welcome. Oral presentations should fit within a 15-minute time slot (+5 minutes for discussion). However, the exact time designated for each presentation might be shortened or lengthened based on the number of participants within the section. In case the total number of participants is too high to fit in the conference schedule, some contributions might be changed from oral presentation to poster (the corresponding author will be notified by e-mail about the change).

The oral presentations will be divided into sections. Each section will start with a keynote lecture (duration 45 minutes). First day of the conference (4 April) is reserved for geosciences, the second day (5 April) will focus on biosciences.

POSTER PRESENTATION
Presentations from any discipline within the field of geo- and biosciences are welcome. The maximum size of the poster should be A0 (84 x 120 cm) in portrait format (not landscape!). The poster session will be held on 5 April in the afternoon. 

REGISTRATION FORM
All participants are required to fill in the registration form and send an abstract (abstract guidelines can be found here). The e-mail address for submitting your SPARC2019 registration is geopolarbrno@gmail.com.

Deadline for registration and abstract submission 29 March 2019.

For more information, please see the conference website.