[Taxacom] Tropical biodiversity in the 21st century: linking taxonomy, genomics and ecological theory

[ICZN-EM]

SYMPOSIUM

Tropical biodiversity in the 21st century: linking taxonomy, genomics and ecological theory

Natural History Museum London, June 3 and 4, 2013

A symposium of the NHM Biodiversity Initiative, in collaboration with the Genomic Observatories Network


About the Symposium

This conference, marking the start of the NHM's Biodiversity Initiative, asks how we can develop  inter-disciplinary, genomic approaches to accelerate the study of biodiversity and function of tropical ecosystems.

The conference will also host a workshop of the Genomic Observatories Network.

For updates on the meeting see
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/research-initiatives/tropical-biodiversity-symposium/index.html  and http://genomicobservatories.blogspot.co.uk/

Call for presentations
There will be ~10 slots for contributed papers.  Participants are invited to contribute 15 minute presentations, to share the results of their work.  In addition, we invite posters which will be presented during a coffee break and wine reception on Day 1.
About the symposium
Metagenomics and next-generation sequencing studies from a wide range of scientific disciplines are rapidly changing the understanding of microbial diversity, but as yet relatively little progress has been made in utilising the power of these techniques for macroscopic organisms.
The causes and structure of high tropical diversity and the wider implications of damage to these ecosystems are particularly poorly understood and stand to benefit most from 'big science' projects involving far-reaching interdisciplinary collaboration.
With the rise of high-throughput sequencing the understanding of broad scale patterns of diversity at all levels from genes to ecosystems finally appears possible but will require a global effort to integrate newly generated digital data with the existing, historical information locked away in museum collections.
Making full use of these data to unravel the complexity of biodiversity patterns will also require the development of new theoretical ecological frameworks within which hypotheses can be generated and tested.


External Speakers

Dawn Field, CEH Oxford
Johnathan Coddington, Smithsonian
Pierre Taberlet, Grenoble
Douglas Yu, Kunming Institute and UEA
Bernhard Misof, Museum Koenig, Bonn
Scott Miller, Smithsonian
Graham Stone, Edinburgh
David Coomes, Cambridge
Andres Baselga, Santiago
Cristina Banks-Leite, Imperial College London
Robert Ewers, Imperial College London

Catherine Graham, Stony Brook

Richard Reeve, Univ Glasgow

Tom Leinster, Univ. Edinburgh