SERCAL 2025: The Annual Conference of the California Society for Ecological Restoration, April 21-23 in Sacramento 

Join 300+ participants from throughout California (and beyond) as we forge partnerships and share strategies 

Every year, SERCAL brings together the leaders and brainpower from the restoration industry, agencies, partners, NGOs, academics, vendors, and the Next Generation of students and emerging professionals. 

From fieldtrips on April 21, to keynotes, panels, and presentations April 22-23, SERCAL's annual conference is the place to gather and explore our options, challenges, and opportunities for creating a more resilient California. Our collective efforts are essential for learning, moving forward, and bringing about positive change — no matter the scope of our work, no matter the challenges we face.  

Be the Delta / Be the Change

Whether your focus is mitigation, restoring degraded landscape, research, creation of habitat corridors, or healthier urban ecosystems... Whether you have two-plus decades of experience or two-plus decades of life on this earth… 

We invite you to share your hard-won answers, the mistakes along the way, and the problems you have yet to solve at SERCAL’s 2025 Annual Conference in Sacramento. 

Here’s the plan

You won’t want to miss starting off the conference with a fieldtrip on Monday, April 21. We’re working on six locations at the moment and will be announcing them later in February once we get all the details. April 22-23 will be held in the beautiful ballrooms at the Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento. During the day we'll have a mix of hour-long keynotes, panels, and session blocks, with plenty of time in between for breaks to absorb it all or for networking. This is our conference hotel with lodging discounts, and we'll serve up an ala carte breakfast, lunch, snacks, and evening receptions. 

There will be 4-5 hour-long blocks per day and, except for keynote presentations, they will be broken into three concurrent sessions. Session blocks are either a 60-minute panel OR three 15-minute presentations with 15 minutes at the end for Q&A. The Poster Session Reception will be held the first evening (April 22). 

HOW TO PARTICIPATE AND GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR TIME:

Exhibit as a Sponsoring Member | Present your work as a talk or poster | Get warmed up for the conference on one of our fabulous fieldtrips! | Make a Difference! Become a Torchbearer to a rising star from the Next Generation

Thank you!! We are super excited and look forward to seeing you! 

register now

ALL ATTENDEES WILL HAVE ACCESS TO THE RECORDINGS AFTER THE CONFERENCE. We were not able to go hybrid this year; we might charge a nominal fee for those who are not able to attend, but would like to watch the recordings.

deets on early bird registration

These rates are good through March 19 — Members: $390 and $60 (fieldtrip) | Non-members: $440 and $90 (fieldtrip). Within a business day of your registration, you will receive an invoice via Squareup. Check your junk folder if you don’t see it! And then please pay promptly. It helps!

Times are challenging for those in agencies and non-profit groups. If you have the ability, please add support for our underfunded presenters — you can make a donation as you register. We’ll be happy to send you a tax letter acknowledging your support.

FIELDTRIPPERS

We are working on up to 6 fieldtrips in the Central Valley and the Delta! If you’ve been on one of our fieldtrips, you know you won’t want to miss out. If you haven’t, consider it a warm-up for meeting new people and being immersed behind-the-scenes in projects you’ve been wanting to see for yourself. Go ahead and reserve your spot now. We’ll be getting the details up in early March.

SCHEDULE

We have some great panels, dedicated sessions, keynotes, and more! We’re still putting it together and will share it the beginning of March. Watch for the emails we put up on the website and/or send to registrants to get the latest details!

lodging

We have a special rate for all conference attendees at our host hotel, the DoubleTree in Sacramento — $159/night (plus taxes, etc.) for either 2 queens or 1 king. You will reserve your room directly through the hotel using this link.

Consider this: Would you be willing to make a difference for a Next Gen attendee by offering to share your room with them? (i.e. an extra bed at no cost to them)? Or if you are local, to host?

You can sign up with varying levels of commitment on the registration form. Last year, we supported more than 100 Next Gen attendees with free dorm rooms, but we don't have that option at our disposal this year. Room-sharing is as close as we can get to making that type of impact happen again, so please let us know if you are willing to support someone who is just starting out in our industry. And if you aren’t up for sharing an extra bed, think about making a contribution!

Are you interested in carpooling with another attendee?

It's a great way 1) to help out someone who needs a ride, 2) make a friend before the conference, and 3) reduce our carbon footprint! We'll work out the finer details closer to the conference. You can indicate your interest — to share or get a ride — as you register.

Questions?

Take a look at the registration form! AND know that we’ll be in touch if we have questions before sending you the invoice. There are real human beings behind this process! :-)

Not a member yet for 2025 but want the discount? Easy peasy. You can join as you register. Just call us a one-stop shop. ;-)

Want to be a sponsor? We’ve got some great options for you.

Your company is considering being a sponsor, which means you might be comped? Don’t worry! Go ahead and register, then email julie@sercal.org and she’ll hold your registration for you.

How our community supports the next generation

stipends, lodging, rideshares, and sponsoring as torchbearers

Are you NextGen or Tribal member and short on cash for making this happen? Go ahead and register — we've integrated the stipend application process into registration. We will do our best to provide as many stipends as we can for travel, get you a bed to sleep on, and provide free registration if you present (a poster) and/or volunteer.  We want you there!!

We can provide at least 80 waived registrations; we are hoping our amazing community will bump up this year’s Next Gen Fund and/or share lodging and carpooling opportunities. We have one Torchbearer Sponsorship to date (thank you GEI Consultants!) and we would love more.

Need your arm twisted? See what we were able to accomplish at last year’s conference!

ALL ABOUT ABSTRACTS and Presenting

We are accepting poster abstracts through march 19

Abstracts must be submitted via our online form FOR all presentations — TECHNICAL, lightning talk, and poster. 

Technical Session Presenters should typically plan on a 15-minute turnaround. There will be a Q&A panel at the end of each session. We will send you a link 2-3 weeks before the conference for uploading your powerpoint presentation and bio.

Lightning Talk Presenters should plan on a 4-minute presentation with a maximum of 5 slides — this is a great opportunity for first-time presenters! We will send you a link six weeks before the conference for uploading your powerpoint presentation and bio.

Poster Presenters should plan on a one-minute “elevator speech” style intro for people who stop by your poster, and of course to answer their questions and comments.

Click on image to download pdf.