Events
2026 Oak Summit
December 15 @ 9:00 am - 4:00 pm
Photo credit: Sara Evans-Peters
December 15 @ 9:00 am – 4:00 pm
Join us for the 2026 Oak Summit! A FREE event where the oak and prairie community comes together to connect, collaborate, and celebrate conservation. From restoration successes to lessons learned in the field, this is your chance to share ideas, spark new partnerships, and help shape the future of oak and prairie ecosystems.
This will be an in-person meeting. Expect further details shortly
Share what you are learning!
What are you learning about oak and prairie conservation and restoration? Have a story, question, lesson, or idea to share? We want to hear from you!
Please fill out the project submission form by Friday, October 2nd, 2026.
We are looking for people to share their experiences, ideas, and lessons learned at the 2026 Oak Summit through short presentations, posters, and facilitated discussions.
We welcome research, restoration projects, cultural knowledge, field experiences, community stories, and new ideas. Whether you’re sharing new research, a restoration success story, lessons learned from a project that didn’t go as planned, or a new idea for collaboration, we invite you to contribute. We want to hear from landowners, practitioners, contractors, land managers, community members, Tribal partners, agency staff, students, academics, and researchers—anyone with something to share about working with oak and prairie ecosystems.
We are especially interested in work and ideas that explore:
- Learning and adapting through restoration: What worked? What didn’t? What surprised you? What would you do differently next time? We also welcome new tools, techniques, approaches, and ideas that could shape the future of restoration and conservation.
- Reviving the processes that sustain healthy oak and prairie ecosystems: Prescribed and cultural fire, grazing, invasive species management, oak pests and diseases, and other challenges and practices that influence the health and resilience of these ecosystems.
- Building resilience for the future: Preparing oak and prairie ecosystems, communities, and conservation efforts for a changing climate and other future challenges.
- Understanding connections in oak and prairie systems: The relationships among people, plants, wildlife, pollinators, fungi, and other organisms that make these ecosystems function.
- People, partnerships, and communities: Tribal partnerships, landowner and community engagement, collaboration, and other ways of building relationships, awareness, and support for oak and prairie conservation.
- Other ideas: If you have something to share that doesn’t fit neatly into these themes, we’d love to hear it.
Learn more about the project types
Short-form presentations are 10 -12 minute presentations with 3 – 5 minutes of Q&A designed for concise, engaging presentations that highlight a project, finding, lesson learned, emerging idea, or practical approach. These presentations are a great opportunity to share one big idea, one important lesson, or one story without needing a full-length presentation.
Posters provide an opportunity to visually share research, monitoring results, restoration projects, tools, or other work related to oak and prairie conservation.
Posters may be particularly well suited for:
- Preliminary or ongoing research
- Monitoring projects
- Restoration case studies
- Maps and spatial analyses
- Community science
- Student projects
- New tools or methods
- Projects that tell a story visually
Facilitated discussions are 45 – 60 minute sessions designed to create space for conversation, collaboration, and shared learning rather than a traditional presentation.
We encourage submissions that pose a compelling question, explore a challenge facing oak and prairie conservation, or bring people together around a shared opportunity.
Examples might include:
- How can we build greater capacity for prescribed fire?
- What are we learning from restoration across the Willamette Valley?
- How can we better coordinate oak conservation across ownership boundaries?
- What does successful oak restoration look like 10, 20, or 50 years from now?
- How can we respond to emerging threats to oak health?
- Where are the biggest gaps in our current conservation efforts?
Facilitated discussions may use small-group activities, guided questions, panel-style conversation, audience participation, or other creative formats.
This event is in partnership with
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