ID: 613 / 66

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: SYSTEMATICS, FLORISTICS, AND CONSERVATION: FACILITATING DATA INTEGRATION TO PROMOTE SOUND SCIENCE. SESSION 1

Abstract: Effective plant conservation, whether it be the protection of endangered species or the control of invasive exotics, depends on sound scientific data and tools. Key scientific resources are needed for practitioners that allow for the accurate identification of organisms, the application of their correct names, understanding of their distributions, and knowing their relative rarity to prioritize conservation action. This work, at the intersection of systematics, floristics, and conservation, presents unique challenges for data aggregation and dissemination. An additional challenge is reflecting continually changing taxonomic, distribution, and conservation status information. Users of various biodiversity datasets are presented with wildly different taxonomic opinions, causing confusion, and the potential for the misallocation of limited resources. This symposium will explore regional, national, and international-scale efforts, with the overlay of conservation and resource management, to develop and maintain these data, presented from the perspectives of researchers and practicing conservation biologists. This symposium should be of interest to a wide array of scientific fields including systematists, biodiversity informaticians, ecologists, and conservation biologists.

Speaker 1: Wesley M. Knapp NatureServe Wesley_Knapp@NatureServe.org The intersection of taxonomy and conservation in the United States and Canada

Speaker 2: Dr. Geoffrey A. Levin Canadian Museum of Nature levin1@Illinois.edu The Flora of North America: a hard copy and online continental flora

Speaker 3: Dr. Alan Weakley University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill & North Carolina Botanical Garden weakley@unc.edu Building and using a database infrastructure for regional taxonomy, floristics, outreach, and biodiversity conservation

Topics (Up to three): Conservation Biology

Topic 2: Systematics

Topic 3: Bioinformatics

Justification: This symposium bridges several of the IBC topics, including bioinformatics, conservation biology, floristics, and systematics and taxonomy, while touching on others, notably education and outreach. Although the speakers will focus on work in specific geographic areas, the challenge of integrating systematics, floristics, and conservation applies globally, so the symposium should have international appeal. Furthermore, the topic is timely given the ever-increasing urgency to implement effective conservation in the face of global climate change, increasing human impact, and continually expanding invasive species.