We prove several results concerning the existence of surfaces of section for the geodesic flows of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces. The surfaces of section $\Sigma $ that we construct are either Birkhoff sections, which means that they intersect every sufficiently long orbit segment of the geodesic flow, or at least they have some hyperbolic components in $\partial \Sigma $ as limit sets of the orbits of the geodesic flow that do not return to $\Sigma $. In order to prove these theorems, we provide a study of configurations of simple closed geodesics of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces, which may have independent interest. Our arguments are based on the curve shortening flow.

We introduce a new method of constructing Birkhoff sections for pseudo-Anosov flows, which uses the connection between pseudo-Anosov flows and veering triangulations. This method allows for explicit constructions, as well as control over the Birkhoff section in terms of its Euler characteristic and the complexity of the boundary orbits. In particular, we show that any transitive pseudo-Anosov flow has a Birkhoff section with two boundary components.