Systematics Conference 2008, Göttingen

From EESwiki

The conference Systematics 2008, held in Göttingen, Germany, 7-11 April 2008, was the first joint meeting of the Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik (GfBS) and the German Botanical Society, section Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (DBG). About 150 talks and 200 posters were presented. The talk sessions were hold from 8-10 April: in the morning there was one plenary session with botanical and zoological themes, in the afternoon up to four parallel sessions in two time frames.

The timing organization of the talk sessions, breaks and posters sessions were well chosen. Also the length of the talks including discussion was optimal, half an hour for the plenary talks, 15 minutes for the afternoon talks what forces everybody to condense their findings to the crucial points and made it possible to follow six talks consecutively. Nearly all speakers respected the time limit, just sometimes there was not enough time left for discussions. I followed talks in nearly all sessions, all on botanical subjects. Quality of the talks and posters was very varying, also in the plenary sessions. Nevertheless I got a good overview of the research focuses and currently applied and new methods in systematics that could be also interesting for my own work. Of course the conference was a great possibility to meet old colleagues and new people to talk about their and my research and get new ideas and insides.

I presented a summary of the data of my recently published paper in a talk “Reevaluation of the cox1 intron in Araceae and angiosperms indicates a history dominated by loss rather than horizontal gene transfer”. As every presentation of data, giving this talk was again a really good experience and I learned a lot, starting from the preparation with the challenge to present such a complex subject comprehendible in such a short time, to practice and finally to hold the talk. The feedback afterwards was very good. Additionally all student’s talks and posters have been evaluated for a final award and the evaluations (three per talk) have been distributed at the end of the conference. So I got three detailed independent reviews with legitimate critics and commendations that will help me a lot for future presentations.