Science and technology librarians need to continually invest time into professional development activities to gain new skills relevant to the faculty and students they serve. Many academic libraries face diminishing budgets and have few travel dollars available for attendance at library and subject-specific conferences. This study determined that a content analysis of a subject-specific conference would be a useful substitute for attendance. I analyzed the 2012 conference program of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) to identify trends shared by ecology faculty and librarians, as well as the most frequently occurring trends and topics. The analysis categorized the 470 sessions by trends identified in the ACRL 2012 Top Trends in Academic Libraries and found that the most frequent trend was communicating value with 51 sessions, followed by higher education with 23 sessions, data curation and staffing with 17 sessions, and information technology with 16 sessions. Some frequently discussed topics included climate change, ecosystem services, plant communities, forests, food webs, and invasive species. Content analysis proved useful for identifying possible collaborative areas with ecology faculty for the benefit of librarians and faculty, as well as pinpointing specific areas and resources for collection development, instruction, and reference.