The US-IALE 2018 Annual Meeting will be held April 8-12 in Chicago, Illinois at the historic Palmer House Hilton. Easily accessible to public transportation and a block from Grant Park and its attractions, the Palmer House was built out of love, burned to the ground in the Great Chicago Fire, rebuilt, and now newly renovated.
Chicago straddles the massive ecological transition zone from the deciduous forests to the east and the oak woodland/tallgrass prairies to the west. The city also straddles the boundary between the two largest watersheds on the continent: the Mississippi River watershed and the Great Lakes watershed. As William Cronon described it, Chicago is "Nature's Metropolis", with its urban core tightly linked to the agricultural and natural ecosystems that expand beyond it. The scale of Chicago's ecological connections to water, food, and biodiversity will generate a truly unique, interdisciplinary conference.