Abstract
This adventure began in 2015 when the Society for Marine Mammalogy and the European Cetacean Society decided to join forces to host a World Conference. Barcelona was chosen by membership vote that year as the venue for the conference, to be co-organized by SUBMON and the University of Barcelona. The World Marine Mammal Conference was full of new and exciting research! We were delighted to welcome a community of over 2700 people from 95 countries involved in marine mammal science and conservation, who shared an intense and rewarding week at the WMMC’19. There will be three global plenary sessions, 627 talks and 1077 posters that presented cutting-edge and thought-provoking research that will help lay the foundation for our work into the future. A total of 1,952 abstracts were submitted for WMMC’19; however, the Program schedule allowed for only 1,652 abstracts to be presented. A panel of 451 experts (listed below) volunteered their time to review and score abstracts on a scale of 1 to 5 for criteria of originality, quality, importance, and presentation. In an effort to minimize reviewer bias, all authors and affiliations were removed from the abstracts before review. Most abstracts were reviewed by 3 experts.After normalizing scores to correct for inter-reviewer variability, abstracts were ranked on the basis of overall score. Authors of the highest-scoring abstracts were given their first preference for presentation, whether poster, speed, or oral. Given this rigorous process and the excellence of the abstracts selected for the conference, we are confident the quality of work presented at this meeting will be unparalleled.