Call for Nominations - International Biogeography Society - Student at Large (2017-2019 term)

Call for nominations (Student@Large)

One of the best ways for students to foster their academic development is to broaden their horizons in every possible aspect. Participating in scientific societies is certainly a way towards such horizon broadening. The International Biogeography Society (IBS) gave me this opportunity as board member representing students in all decision-making. Indeed, being able to speak out as part of my research field has convinced me on the importance of being actively involved within the larger apparatus of scientific development. This opportunity also made me more aware than ever about the relevance of networking with other scientists in order to contribute to the advancement of my research field. Such contribution should come from all members, new and old, early career and leading scientists. Students, the future of any research field, represent a fundamental part for that contribution to be valuable in the short and long term. 

I would like to invite all IBS student members to consider applying for the Student at Large position of the IBS governing board for the 2017-2019 period. This is a great opportunity for those interested and motivated students seeking to contribute to the advancement of biogeography and to get involved in organizing and promoting the IBS activities that can benefit all members, especially their fellow students. The IBS Student at Large not only represents student members at the IBS board but also serves as part of different committees within the board in order to promote student recognition, involvement and assistance. More details on the IBS-S@L position can be found below.

Fabricio Villalobos
Student at Large, International Biogeography Society
fabricio.villalobos@gmail.com

Objective
Represents the Student members of IBS in decision-making by the IBS Board

List of duties:
1. Chairs the Student Travel Award Ad Hoc Committee under the supervision of the Vice President for Development and Awards
2. Chairs the Early Career Biogeographers Committee under the supervision of the Vice President for Conferences and in that role organizes the poster competition and Student Discussion Groups
3 Serves as a member of the Advertising and Outreach Ad Hoc Committee Chaired by the Vice President of Public Affairs and Communication

Key Functional and relational responsibilities:
1. Represents Graduate Student Members in all decision-making
2. Works closely with the Vice President of Development and Awards to increase Graduate Student Membership in the IBS
3. Works closely with the Vice President of Public Affairs and Communication to promote IBS activities

HOW TO APPLY
Please send a short email to biogeography.ibs@gmail.com (subject:  Student @ Large position) by April 8th stating:

• your institution
• geographic location
• years into graduate program
• why you are interested in IBS and what you feel you can achieve as student at large (max 150 words)

Selection of Candidate for the Position:  Candidates will be evaluated by the IBS nominating committee based on their interest in IBS, and their role. Geographical location, gender and stage in graduate program will also be a consideration in deciding which candidates will be put forward for election.

A total of 4 candidates will be chosen to stand for election, votes being solicited from the entire membership of IBS during the general election in September 2016.

7th International Conference of the IBS to be in Bayreuth Germany

The International Biogeography Society and local host Dr. Carl Beierkuhnlein are pleased to announce that the 7th Biennial Conference of the IBS will take place at the University of Bayreuth in northern Bavaria, Germany, in early January 2015.

The University of Bayreuth hosts many national and international conferences and workshops throughout the year. Founded in the 1970s, Ecology and Environmental Sciences are a particular strength of the University.  Its lecture halls, seminar rooms and the cafeteria are all in close proximity to each other.  

Bavaria has an extraordinary variety of landscapes ranging from continental dry basins over limestone hills to siliceous mountains. The Franconian Alb (20 minutes from Bayreuth) with its karst geology is one of the biodiversity hotspots in Germany. This landscape also hosts the highest density of breweries worldwide, some with more than 500 years of tradition. The Fichtelgebirge (30 minutes from Bayreuth) is famous for nordic ski sports.  Bayreuth is world famous for the annual Richard Wagner Festival.  Stay tuned for more information as it develops following the IBS Miami meeting.

Reminder:  IBS Miami early-bird registration deadline is October 18th. Some workshops and field trips are beginning to fill up.

IBS elections

The IBS Elections are now open! Please cast your votes for the IBS
board, for the 2009-2011 term.

To cast your vote, go to: http://www.regonline.com/Checkin.asp?EventId=655642

The voting period ends on Oct. 31.

New IBS web page

The International Biogeography Society has just launched a brand new, more attractive design for its web page, at the usual address (http://www.biogeography.org/). There you can easily access the formerly available sections, including resources, the Newsletter, links to publications and the IBS blog, or access to your membership benefits.


Also, IBS news and events are highlighted in the main page, where currently you can find a direct link to the registration process for the Mérida meeting (see above), and non-members can easyly find how to join the IBS. Do not forget to encourage other fellow biogeographers to come to the next IBS meeting and eventually join us as new members.

Volunteer to help IBS

Dear Biogeographers:

The International Biogeography Society has three goals:

1. Foster communication and collaboration among biogeographers in disparate academic fields
2. Promote the training and education of biogeographers
3. Increase awareness and interest in the contributions of biogeographers

Are you interested in biogeography and would you like to help the society accomplish its goals? To do this you should do three things.

First, if you are not a member, joint IBS - Membership is a bargain at $40.00 per year ($30.00 per year for students). In addition to supporting the society, becoming a member of IBS provides several personal advantages: 1) the opportunity to participate in international meetings of the Society, 2) discounts (up to 20%) on books published in association with IBS, 3) free online access to four of Blackwell Publishing's journals: Journal of Biogeography, Global Ecology & Biogeography, Diversity & Distributions, and Ecography, all journals covering aspects of biogeography and ecology, and 4) a 20% discount on access to two additional Blackwell Publishing journals: Journal of Avian Biology and Oikos.

Second, check out the website (http://www.biogeography.org/) and see what you might like to be involved with. Possibly helping with meetings, hosting an off-year meeting, serving on a committee, judging posters, recruiting new members, or even nominating someone for the Alfred Russel Wallace Award.

Finally, contact me or any member of the board and tell us what you are interested in doing for IBS or we can perhaps suggest something. We can always use someone to help stuff flyers in meeting packets!

Cheers, V. A. Funk, President IBS

IBS 2009 - First announcement

Your IBS Board and specifically Ella Vázquez-Domínguez and the Local Committee at the Instituto de Ecología, Universidad Autónoma de México, México D.F. invite you to plan ahead now to attend the 2009 biennial meetings of the IBS in Mérida, Yucatán, México from 8 to 12 January 2009.

Mérida is in the midst of cultural, natural, historical, and geological riches. The beautiful colonial “White City” was founded in January 1542 on the ruins of the Mayan city of T’ho, and is only 120 km from the archeological wonders of Chichén Itzá. The center of the Chicxulub Crater, formed from an asteroid impact 65 mya and implicated in the K-T extinctions, is located 20 km outside of Mérida (in the pueblo of Chicxulub). Several biosphere reserves are within easy distance of Mérida (e.g., Celestun and Ría Lagarto Biosphere Reserves). Check out these and other enchanting features of Mérida on the web.

Climate should be ideal in January, and we’re planning field trips to explore the natural and archeological wealth of the region.

Your enthusiastic response to our survey about our biennial meetings told us what you most liked about our meetings and what needed improvement. The respondents also gave us clear directives on how we might improve upon them. Specifically, the membership particularly valued the personal, intimate nature of our meetings that encourages interaction and cross-discipline discussion. At the same time, members wanted increased opportunities for oral presentations, particularly for up-and-coming researchers and advanced graduate students; increased, dedicated opportunities for group discussions; longer time and increased space to view posters; and increased involvement of paleontologists, geographers, and geologists. The survey results offered specific means to these ends, and we are most grateful for this input. As a result of your comments we have altered the format of the meeting; we hope you like the results.

Board considerations for the Mérida meetings fall into three general categories: 1) format of symposia; 2) topics of symposia; and 3) limits on meeting size. We’re planning to experiment with several different symposium formats that will include that of previous meeting symposia; one that includes selected contributed papers; and we’ve agreed (after extensive debate) to experiment with ½-day of no more than 3 concurrent sessions. By creatively selecting concurrent session topics, we hope to avoid the typical effect of segregating participants by discipline.

We’re looking for symposium topics that will continue and enhance our success of involving biogeographers from diverse disciplines, intrigue those underrepresented sciences (e.g., paleo, geography, and geology) and the general public, and also be most pertinent to the regional setting. We’re currently considering the following topics for four symposia: Environmental Change and Ecological Collapse; K-T Boundary extinctions; Diversification Across the Neotropical-Nearctic Transition Zone; Biogeography of Paleoboundaries and Paleo Hotspots; Caribbean Biogeography—Integrating Marine & Terrestrial Biogeography; the Great American Biotic Exchange; Human Biogeography and the Biogeography of Infectious Diseases; and Asian American Disjuncts.

Additionally, we are very pleased to announce that John C. Avise will be in attendance to receive the 2007 – 2009 Alfred Russel Wallace Award, joining our first two distinguished recipients, John C. Briggs (2003 – 2005) and Jared Diamond (2005 – 2007). And we’ve already scheduled one workshop: “Visualizing Evolution in Space and Time.” For background information about the workshop, see the article by David Kidd in the Summer 2007 IBS Newsletter 5(2):6-8 (available online at http://biogeography.blogspot.com/2007/07/geophylogenies-uniting-space-and-time.html).

While the growth of our Society has been beyond our expectations and demonstrates both the vital role and enthusiastic support of our organization, we share the members’ concern that we don’t destroy the most valued aspects of our meetings by “loving it to death” with overwhelming numbers. Thus we’re setting a cap of 550 on meeting participation, and of 250 posters (in three sessions). It looks like it will be first-come, first-served; so stay tuned (via the IBS web site and Newsletter) for registration dates.

We’re working hard to respond to the membership’s input, and to build on the success of our first three biennial meetings. The Board will be meeting in January to finalize the format and topics of the meetings. If you have further input or questions, please email the VP for Conferences (Dave Hafner) at david.hafner(at)state.nm.us. If you would like to suggest speakers or titles of talks for the above symposia, please send that information to Dave. 2011 IBS Meetings.—It’s never too early to plan on the next meetings! If you have suggestions for a meeting venue, or (even better) would be interested in hosting the 2011 meetings, let Dave Hafner know!

Dave Hafner, VP Conferences and Ella Vázquez-Domínguez, director-at-large
Check the latest news on the conference at http://www.biogeography.org/meetings.htm

Edward O. Wilson — First Honorary Member of the International Biogeography Society

E.O. Wilson has accepted the IBS invitation to become its first Honorary Member. At the suggestion of Rob Whittaker, the President-elect, the board of IBS unanimously agreed that Wilson be its first Honorary member in recognition of his seminal contributions to island biogeography, ecology, and evolution. Mark Lomolino announced the award after a talk by Dr. Wilson in the recent symposium, ”The Theory of Island Biogeography at 40” at Harvard University on October 5-6, 2007.

Member Input Shapes January 2009 Meeting in Mérida, México

Who knew that putting “the posters between the booze and the participants” was a suggestion on the tip of the tongue of so many members? This level of detail in member preference is shaping the scope and scale of the next international meeting of the Society as a result of two electronic surveys conducted earlier this year. Dr. David Hafner (david.hafner(at)state.nm.us) and his team are using this survey data to plan the next international meeting, to be held in 8-12 January 2009 at Merida, Mexico. Dr. Hafner’s team is wrestling with issues ranging from how to register and entertain the nonscientists traveling with their biogeographer partners to how to recruit and prepare the speakers for the various symposia. Polling results indicate that the success or failure of the next meeting hinges, in the collective mind of members, on several key decisions made well in advance of the actual meeting. The central challenge before the IBS Board is how to maintain the intimacy and intensity of the next meeting while recognizing the explosive growth of IBS.

In the past two years IBS has tripled in size. IBS membership now exceeds 700 and may well grow again, substantially, by January 2009. Biogeography is a hot topic and is attracting increasing attention around the world. Members tell us that being bigger should not be the goal and that we should consider capping membership or meeting attendance in order to keep the international meetings intimate. Such caps may be necessary but until that decision is made other means of accommodating our rapidly expanding membership also are being explored.

In particular, members said that creating concurrent sessions to reduce session size would diminish the value of the meeting. Full plenary sessions allow for a shared meeting experience. That experience forms the basis for conversations and interactions throughout the four-day meeting. However, there is a strong desire to hear additional points of view and to expand opportunities for discussion. Rather than running parallel sessions provocative presentations from a wider array of scientists and graduate students are being proposed. Such an approach would require more pre-meeting planning but would result in greater value for participants.

One idea tested at the Canary Island meetings to stimulate conversation was end-of-day, small group discussions. Initially populated by students who were awarded travel stipends, the demand for these sessions exceeded all expectations. Participants in the small group discussions (each organized by an established researcher who was not a symposium speaker) were so overwhelmingly positive that non-awardees begged to participate. Those who participated were unanimously positive in their praise and asked that the small group discussions become a regular feature of the meetings. The discussion sessions became a kind of “meet and greet” for shy and uncertain students (and some faculty) who nevertheless had much to say. It is easier to ask a question or state an opinion in a group of 12 than stand and speak to several hundred meeting participants. In retrospect, we should have known it would work out this way. Thank you, members, for making this point to meeting organizers.

We also have learned that a large part of your decision to attend the next meeting is the cost of travel. We will be offering travel stipends to students from around the world and to researchers from developing countries. It is still too early to know the exact details of these travel awards but if you are interested in obtaining travel assistance watch for upcoming editions of this newsletter and look for email messages from Dr. George Stevens, VP for Development and Awards, at georgecstevens(at)hotmail.com. As before these travel awards will be announced to the membership and applications will be made electronically. Keep your email information updated on the www.biogeography.org website (or jump directly to the membership portal by typing http://www.regonline.com/IBSMembership into your browser) to make sure we know how to contact you in the coming year.

Google maps output showing the location of Mérida, at the Yucatán Peninsula of México

Even for those of you who are not planning on applying for a travel stipends, purchasing your airline tickets in advance can save you hundreds of dollars. Our next international meeting will be begin with workshops on the 8^th of January, 2009 and end with field trips to nearby ruins and ecologically interesting sites on the 12^th of January, 2009. Book your travel through to airport code “MID.” Shuttles from the airport will be available and included in your meeting registration fees. Currently airfares are $600 to Mérida, Mexico from points in the United States, $1,200 from South America, $1,600 from the UK and Europe, and a staggering $5,900 from Australia.

In the very least, mark your calendar from the 8^th through the 12^th of January, 2009. If you are unable to attend the 2009 IBS meeting you can expect a slow week as many of your Biogeographer colleagues will be benefiting from your meeting planning advice in beautiful Mérida, Mexico.

George C. Stevens,VP for Development and Awards

Check the latest news on the conference at http://www.biogeography.org/meetings.htm

The biogeography mailing list

Dear Members of International Biogeography Society,

We are pleased to announce the creation of a biogeography listserv. We hope this will be a forum that will encourage communication and collaboration among biogeographers.

This list will be limited to active members of the International Biogeography Society and will be used to distribute information regarding biogeography. This may include occasional society announcements, job announcements, workshops, upcoming meetings, and other biogeography related topics that our members feel appropriate to post.

To subscribe to biogeography_L, please send the following message to:

listproc@nevada.edu

(Note: nothing in the "subject" line)

subscribe biogeography_L

We look forward to hearing from you,

IBS Board of Directors

Cheers,

Lois F. Alexander
Treasurer of the IBS

Let’s blog

Dear fellow biogeographers,

Several IBS members proposed the creation of a web blog for the Society in the last meeting in the Canary Islands. A blog is defined as a ‘website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order’.

Blogs have become mainstream media tools for providing commentary and news on the Internet. In July 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 73 million blogs and the number of people that reads blogs, every day, is much larger.

Surprisingly, few scientific societies have created blogs. However, if the aim is to promote a scientific discipline outside academia a good way to start is by creating a blog. Blogs are new and we are still learning how to use them effectively. So you are bound to see many changes as we go along.

I hope the IBS blog will help increasing communication among biogeographers and promote the discipline outside the walls of the academia.

If you are a member of the IBS, enthusiastic about the project and want to become a regular contributor to the blog, please let us know. Any ideas and suggestions are welcome.

We hope you see this project being yours as much as it is ours.

All the best,

Miguel B. Araújo
Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications of the IBS