Thematic symposia (2)
Species-level taxonomy is making a come-back. The global discovery, description and naming of new mollusc species continues at a steady pace. Undersampled regions or habitats, understudied families, as well as old faunas being revisited with new characters, all contribute new species to the global inventory, as they have in the past. However, the global context of molluscan exploration is changing with, e.g., the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Barcoding of Life or the Global Biodiversity Information Facility directly or indirectly affecting the way we collect, analyze and archive specimens and information related to them. How are new explorations changing our perception of the magnitude of regional or global faunas? Where are the frontiers? How is the molecular revolution impacting day-to-day on alpha taxonomy? What are the bottlenecks to describing and naming new mollusc species? What problems and solutions do we share with other taxonomists, and what makes malacologists different? What is / what should be the place of malacological journals in this endeavour? These will be the core questions dealt with by this symposium.
Contact:
Dr. Philippe Bouchet, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 55, rue Buffon, F-75005 Paris, France
Dr. Somsak Panha, Dept. Biology, Chulalongkorn University, 254 Phyathai Road, Patumwan, Bangkok, 10330 Thailand
