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According to The Missoulian (archive):
Several of Missoula's top federal fire scientists have been denied permission to attend the International Fire Congress later this month, leading conference organizers to suspect censorship of climate-related research.
"Anyone who has anything related to climate-change research — right away was rejected," said Timothy Ingalsbee of the Association for Fire Ecology, a nonprofit group putting on the gathering. Ingalsbee noted that was his personal opinion, and that the AFE [Association for Fire Ecology] is concerned that a federal travel restriction policy may be more to blame.
The Missoulian also said (archive):
The scientists no longer attending include Matt Jolly, who was to present new work on "Climate-induced variations in global severe weather fire conditions," Karin Riley on "Fuel treatment effects at the landscape level: burn probabilities, flame lengths and fire suppression costs," Mike Battaglia on "Adaptive silviculture for climate change: Preparing dry mixed conifer forests for a more frequent fire regime," and Dave Calkin, who was working on ways to manage the human response to wildfire.
takyon: Also at Scientific American (thanks to another Anonymous Coward).
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday November 14 2017, @04:30PM
Or it means the organizers want to make sure people who might not have a huge travel budget can attend at least occasionally. It's not like these are in friggin' Tijuana. If they're held at a popular resort/vacation spot -- as many "conferences" are -- then you might be right...but ones like this that are just moving between major cities in different parts of the country are probably just trying to ensure they aren't getting the same group of people every single time. Not everyone has an unlimited budget for flights for their entire staff. Some people are only going to be going if they can pile into a car and drive there in an afternoon.
Not everyone is as comfortable with the internet and absorbing information through text as we are. And there's value to collaboration that you don't get just by publishing a paper online. Conferences certainly aren't perfect, and might not be the ideal way to do that either...but I think they do still have some value.