From Plant Press, Vol. 5, No. 4 from October 2002.
The fields of biological diversity and conservation were at the forefront at the Sixth International Congress of Systematic and Evolutionary Biology (ICSEB VI) held 9-16 September at the University of Patras in Patras, Greece. The theme of the conference was “Biodiversity in the Information Age” and several symposia focused on conservation research.
Among the keynote addresses, two were highly significant for conservationists. James Edwards of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), in Denmark, presented “Biodiversity Informatics as a Megascience: Fully Exploiting Biodiversity Data,” giving attendees a clear understanding of how GBIF plans to operate. Daniel Janzen of the University of Pennsylvania presented his views on the “gardenification” of wild areas in his talk “Conserving Tropical Wildland Biodiversity through Non-Damaging Development.”
Several symposia of invited speakers focused on biodiversity and conservation. Global change, biogeography, GBIF, and the ALL Species Foundation were the topics of a few symposia. Two others looked at global biodiversity and the use of natural history resources in conservation assessments. The former was the focus of “Life, the Universe and Everything,” a symposium organized by Vicki Funk and Dennis P. Gordon of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand. The symposium investigated how far taxonomists have come in our efforts to understand the history of life. Seventeen speakers attempted to cover all of the major clades of life. Each speaker had been asked to address three questions with respect to his/her group: Where are we in our attempts to determine the phylogeny and sister group relationships of this group?; How can these results be interpreted in the light of the history of Earth?; and, Where do we go from here? The symposium ended with a presentation of the current phylogeny of life in graphic form.
A separate symposium addressed how natural history collections have been and can be used in conservation work. “Using Natural History Resources for Conservation Assessment” was the title of a symposium organized by John Kress and Gary Krupnick. Speakers of the symposium addressed the strengths and weaknesses of several classes of information, used to assess levels of species diversity and distribution for conservation purposes. These classes of biological information range from a complete inventory of all organisms on Earth, to collected biological specimens, to expert opinion. All classes of information comprise the resources found in natural history institutions and botanical gardens.
Held every four to six years, ICSEB is the primary meeting of systematists and evolutionary biologists worldwide. Currently, the Congress is held under the auspices of IOSEB (International Organization for Systematic and Evolutionary Biology), which was created at ICSEB V in Budapest. The aim of the Organization is to embrace all relevant aspects of systematic and evolutionary biology including subjects ranging from molecular to global, and from descriptive to theoretical.