Session proposals can be submitted during the public call for sessions. Before submitting a session proposal, please check the provisional programme and already suggested sessions. Rather than proposing similar sessions, you may contact conveners or directly propose modifications to already suggested or existing sessions if you would like to be involved.

When submitting a session, the following steps are required:

• Defining the session with a title and a short scope description (200–2500 characters) as well as a short title (at most 45 characters); considering the mention of related projects in your session scope.
• Identifying the conveners and co-conveners by first name, last name, and email address. We would welcome that different career stages, genders, and countries or institutes are considered for your convener team. The involvement of Early Career Scientists is strongly encouraged.
• Selecting the suitable Programme Stream (PS) and submitting your session proposal to this PS, only.
• Indicating co-organization with another Programme Stream (if relevant).

The Programme Stream Moderators (PSMs) will build the session programme from the provisional programme and the new session proposals; they can suggest merging proposed sessions that are similar and contact the respective convenor teams. You will be informed about the final acceptance of your session by email before the start of the call for abstracts.

The session dashboard is the web interface and starting point for all the tools available for the session organisation. The convener login link is provided in the main menu at the top of the website. Once abstracts have been submitted, this tool also provides up-to-date information and statistics about the contributions to the session during the whole period of the session and programme organization.

The session modification enables you to define or to modify the title, short title as well as the description of your session, and add co-conveners. Once the full session programme with the presentation schedules is uploaded by the end of June, no modifications are possible anymore. However, any new information about your session can be added as “Public Information” and will appear directly with the session programme.
This tool also provides the options to upload or link session material that may be used to promote your session during the call for abstracts. The options to upload or link session material is available from mid-February when the call for abstracts opens.
This file may later be modified, to be used for example for a short introduction to the onsite session; it is then also available for display in the lecture room. (see separate chairing your session guidelines). The limit for uploading is 50 MB. If you provide a link to a video on YouTube or Vimeo, a thumbnail will automatically be displayed in the session programme.

For the actual building of your session programme from the abstracts, three tools, named Session Organization I, II and III – short forms SOI, SOII and SOIII – are available:

During the abstract implementation phase SOI, conveners are asked to review submitted abstracts of three different types:

• Review abstracts originally submitted to your session ("Review of submitted abstracts to your session")
• Review abstracts that were suggested for transfer to your session by another convener ("Review of transferred abstracts to your session")
• Review abstracts without any session assignment ("Review of unassigned abstracts to your session")

Transfer of an abstracts until 1 May 2025: Transfer of an abstract to another session should be used with care: normally the authors have a reason for selecting a specific session for their abstract. If you want to move a contribution nonetheless, ideally you immediately communicated with the author(s) first. Please note that transfer of an abstract needs to be done until 1 May 2025, so the convenors of other sessions still have the possibility to consider the suitability of the abstract for their session

In addition, conveners may upload contributions that were directly sent to them. Please note that abstracts uploaded by conveners are listed under "Implementation summary and finalization". All these actions can be modified as long as the "Implementation summary and finalization" action has not been completed. After having completed the reviews and uploads, please check the implementation summary and then finalise the "Abstract implementation". The outcome of this tool is the final list of active contributions to be scheduled in your session. The authors will then receive a letter of acceptance/rejection by email (14 May 2025).

The PSC asks all convener teams to finalize this task by 5 May 2025; open sessions will delay the development of the session programme. In case the convener team does not finalize the "Abstract implementation", the Programme Stream Moderators will take over and decide according to their own assessment.

In parallel to the Abstract Implementation (SOI), conveners also have the possibility to provide the PSC with any scheduling preferences (Session tagging, SOII). These may include inter-session relations such as no-overlap (max 3) or back-to-back scheduling (max 2) or any other information that you consider to be useful. However, SOI has to be completed first for SOII to become accessible.

Please note that the decision on allocation of the number of time blocks for oral and poster presentations will be done by the PSC by the end of May, and will in general be proportional to the number of abstracts received for a session. Should you want to draw the attention of the PSC to special considerations and requests, please use the "Optional information" box. Missing information from the SOII tool will be completed by the Programme Stream Moderators to the best of their knowledge.

The PSC will take your scheduling preferences as much as possible into account. Given the many competing preferences from conveners, there is no guarantee that all of these can be accommodated in the final session programme.

The PSC will schedule your session on a specific day at a specific time. Your session may be scheduled during one (small number of abstracts) or more time blocks (high number of abstracts); for very large sessions the scheduling may even cover more than one day. Following the PSC’s schedule finalising, conveners are asked to:

• Assign each abstract as oral or as poster presentation and define the ordering of the presentations for both the oral and poster sessions. Information on the presentation form (onsite/online) for each abstract will be available in the system.
• Assess carefully whether any of the abstracts could be selected as solicited (30min) presentation: the rationale to select a solicited paper should be based on the information in the abstract, i.e. is the work about an innovative study with interesting new findings? Does it have a clear potential for a wider interest in the community? Is it a comprehensive state-of-the-art review or about a major breakthrough?
  One solicited presentation per session is foreseen, for larger sessions one solicited presentation per 2-hour time block may be assigned, but please consider scheduling solicited presentations with great care since they will reduce the overall number of oral presentations.
• Schedule a 15-minute time slot for short poster pitches in your oral programme.

With respect to scheduling of presentations by anyone on the convenor team, please consider the following recommendations:

• A session chair should not give an oral presentation in the session block he/she is chairing (this can normally be avoided, if the session is large enough to cover more than one session block moderated by different chairs).
• (Co-)Conveners should not give solicited talks in their own session.
• Solicited presentations should preferentially be presented on-site.
• If, after allocation of the presentation times, a number of oral preference submissions have to be assigned as poster presentations, we see it as fair if (co-)conveners first consider the poster presentation type for their own oral-preference submissions, if there are any.

Please find more details on the meeting format here

Your selection will generate your draft session programme. The next task is to:

• Identify two (or more) chairpersons for each of the oral session blocks.
• Identify two (or more) chairpersons for the poster session.

Then finalize the “Presentation Selection”.

In case the convener team of a session does not finalize the "Presentation selection", the Programme Stream Moderators will take over and complete the scheduling according to the best of their knowledge and assessment.

The final meeting programme for all sessions will then be uploaded. All authors will receive their letter of schedule by email, indicating the time and type of their presentation.

• Send a message to all presenters (oral and poster) in your session a few months before the conference to introduce yourself, thank the presenters for submitting an abstract to your session, remind them to register and to upload their presentation files in advance of the meeting.
• Contact all poster presenters shortly after the Letter of Schedule has been sent to inform them about the poster pitches and ask them to send a slide before a given deadline.
• From August the option to specifically address “Authors without a conference registration” will become available in the mail tool, so you can ask these authors to confirm they will attend and present in your session.

To contact the authors of your session the mail tool is available until 14 Oct 2025.

• Through the mail tool, conveners can contact presenting authors or all authors of their session, for example to make them aware of the upload options of display material or live presentation files, or to provide guidance on how you intend to run the session. Use the “Enter mail tool” button (blue) in your dashboard
• Conveners can also get in touch with the contact author or all authors of a specific contribution. This tool is available in the list of abstracts via a small envelope icon below the abstract number.

Once you clicked on the envelope icon the mailtool mask below will appear: you can select the contact authors or all co-authors of the paper, type the tile and message and if you want to have the message cc’d to a co-convener can insert their email address as well.

• Detailed guidelines on chairing oral and poster sessions will become available spring 2025.

Oral and poster sessions are chaired by conveners or assigned chairpersons. Chairpersons should be nominated during the SOIII – Presentation Selection phase (see above), but can also be provided or updated at a later stage, up to the conference week: log into the session dashboard, in the box SOIII – Presentation Selection click on "View": at the top right corner the chair person names can be edited.

I. Chairs of oral presentation sessions
To manage and coordinate the tasks of a hybrid oral session (onsite Q&A and online questions and contributions), we recommend to nominate at least two chairpersons for each time block. Detailed information about the onsite logistics and session moderation recommendations will become available at the Guidelines for chairpersons of oral sessions in spring 2025.
II. Chairs of poster sessions
Please also nominate chairs for the poster session; detailed information about poster display and poster sessions, as well as suggestions how to organise a poster session will become available at the Guidelines for chairpersons of poster sessions in spring 2025.

Session materials: You can upload files and links via your session dashboard. Session material, for example for a short introduction to the session, can be uploaded by conveners in advance and is then also available for display in the lecture room. You can upload a file and/or a link to a website. All files and links will be accessible in the conference programme and accessible for registered attendees only.

Files can be uploaded in the formats *.pdf, *.ppt/pptx, *.pps/ppsx, *.png, *.jpg, or *.mp4. The file size is limited to 50 MB, except for video files being limited to 200 MB. If using videos inside Power Point files, please embed the video. Uploaded *.mp4 video files are hosted on the Copernicus Vimeo channel , which implies the acceptance of the Vimeo guidelines.

Session material and session summary files are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, please read the full licence agreement. External contents linked from the conference programme must follow the standards for an ethically correct, equitable, safe, open, and respectful environment for scientific activities.

If you have any questions or need further explanation about these tools please contact Copernicus staff at ems2025@copernicus.org.