Cambio climático y Sistemática

Climate Change and Systematics

3 day meeting
1st to 3rd of September 2008

A meeting organised by the Department of Botany, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

This meeting, organised on behalf of the Systematics Association and the Linnean Society, will provide a forum for systematists to present and discuss their research as it relates to the critical issue of Global Climate Change. The conference is open to everyone, whatever their chosen discipline within systematics.

This meeting will examine the problems posed by Global Climate Change and will centre on three themes: 1. Climate change and speciation/extinction; 2. Climate change and biogeography; 3. Climate change: documenting and conserving biodiversity.

We feel this meeting is timely because of interest in this topic at all levels in society, especially governmental. For example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment states that 'By the end of the twenty-first century, climate change and its impacts may be the dominant direct driver of biodiversity loss and changes in ecosystem services globally' and 'Historically, habitat and land use change have had the biggest impact on biodiversity across biomes. Climate change is projected to increasingly affect all aspects of biodiversity, from individual organisms, through populations and species, to ecosystem composition and function'. The most recent IPCC report this year also highlights these issues. Therefore, global climate change needs to be addressed holistically by the systematics community.

Certainly the changes in the density and location of the World's biodiversity are likely to have impacts on speciation/extinction rates and on the ability of systematits to delimit, through Monographs, Faunas and Floras, the World's biodiversity.

Additional Information

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Más allá de la Cladística

Beyond Cladistics: A Festschrift for Prof C J Humphries FLS

*Sandra Knapp FLS and David Williams FLS

Three-day Meeting
1st to 3rd of October 2008, 9:00 AM

As an approach to the discovery of phylogenetic relationships among organisms, cladistics took the systematics community by storm. According to David Hull, in his 1988 account of its history, cladistics was winning out everywhere; according to Colin Patterson, cladistics “began in the late 1960s, accelerated in the 1970s, and was virtually complete by the eighties”; in contrast, Gareth Nelson suggested that cladistics is suffering from “Arrested Development”. This symposium, entitled Beyond Cladistics, in honour of botanist Chris Humphries, will address some general issues relating to cladistics: its past, its present and its future – if, indeed, there is anything beyond cladistics itself.

Additional Information

Programme (pdf)
Registration Form (pdf)

Posiciones disponibles para taxonomos en el IISE

CYBERTAXONOMY AND SPECIES EXPLORATION
The International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) at Arizona State University invites applications for two unique tenured/tenure-track faculty positions at the intersection of life sciences and informatics. The IISE is dedicated to modernizing and advancing descriptive taxonomy and its collection and cyber infrastructures. We seek individuals with unusual vision to serve as ASU professors and as assistant directors of the institute. Positions are open rank, salaries commensurate with experience. Each position involves the use of effective leadership skills and a desire and capacity to work as part of a trans-disciplinary problem-solving team. The IISE, with partner museums and botanical gardens, is committed to identifying and removing obstacles to rapid progress in taxonomy. The successful candidates will join the director and existing assistant directors as the IISE leadership team. Each position includes 30% administration in IISE managing projects and partnerships, 30% teaching in the tenure home unit, and 40% research in area of expertise, related broadly to Institute goals.
Assistant Director for Monography and Inventories. The successful candidate must have an earned doctorate in systematic biology and demonstrated experience with descriptive taxonomy in a terrestrial or freshwater arthropod taxon. As assistant director, the successful candidate will coordinate interdisciplinary teams and advance projects with partner museums that include building international taxon knowledge communities, producing online monographic treatments, and undertaking large scale species inventories as well as work with IISE team to identify and remove impediments to taxonomy. Tenure home will be in School of Life Sciences.
Assistant Director for Taxonomic Cyberinfrastructure. The successful candidate must have an earned doctorate in computer science/engineering and demonstrated technical leadership for a domain specific cyberinfrastructure for taxonomy that will create and apply a new generation of tools, techniques and research environments that accelerate species exploration in all its phases. The successful candidate will both engage in projects with interdisciplinary teams of faculty, students, and partner institutions to conceive, engineer and prototype new digital tools and software as well as liaise with the Fulton School of Engineering faculty and external partners to recruit expertise appropriate to solve particular problems. Tenure home will be in the School of Computing and Informatics within the Fulton School of Engineering.

Please send CV, brief statement of interest, and names and e-mail addresses of four references to: Dr. Quentin Wheeler, Director, IISE c/o Ms. Shannon Keen at shannon.keen@asu.edu. Documents must be submitted in either Microsoft Word or PDF format. Review of applications will begin October 15, 2008, and continue until the search is closed. Nominations are welcomed. A background check is required for employment. Arizona State University is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer committed to excellence through diversity.