Conferencia Internacional de Biogeografia en Mexico

The Fourth Biennial Conference of the International Biogeography Society

The meeting will take place January 8-12, 2009 in Mérida, México.

Invited symposia will feature talks on the biogeography of disease, patterns and processes in biotic interchanges, disjunct distributions in Asia and America, and the biogeography of species extinction.

Attendees are invited to submit abstracts for oral and poster presentations. The conference will also include workshops, field excursions, and social events.

Registration, contact, and additional information may be found at: http://www.biogeography.org.

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

More Information

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)