From the society: Getting to know IBS Early Career Members

Abstract

membership corner ISSN 1948‐6596 from the society Getting to know IBS Early Career Members The International Biogeography Society (IBS), founded just 10 years ago, is fast growing both in terms of members and activities offered (Field and Heaney 2011). Students and early‐career bio‐ geographers are also becoming increasingly in‐ volved within the IBS. From 2002 to 2010, the pro‐ portion of new members who are students joining the IBS each year has increased from 23% to 48%. Currently, student members comprise 35% of IBS’s 740 members. The IBS, aware of the rising importance of these younger members, has been trying to increase the benefits available for them. In addition to the student travel grants, poster awards and discussion groups held at the IBS meetings, the IBS is trying to foster interaction among students and postdocs, which recently cul‐ minated in the first IBS Early Career conference that was held at Oxford University from 23 to 25 September 2011 (http://www.biogeography.org/ html/Meetings/index.html). With the intention of getting to know its early‐career members (herein ECM) and learning their opinions on the services provided by the IBS and on how these can be improved, the IBS in‐ vited ECM to participate in a survey that was held in June 2011. Of the 48 ECM that completed this survey, 11% were Junior Postdocs, 75% were PhD students, 8% were Masters students, and 6% were undergraduate students. Around 17% were aged between 20‐25 years, 49% were 26‐30 years, 23% were 31‐35 years, and 11% were more than 35 years young; 56% were female and 44% were male. Although most ECM are currently affiliated either with North American or European institu‐ tions (50% and 33% respectively; total of 42 an‐ swers), they represent a total of 24 nationalities; 26% are from North America, 17% from Central and South America, 15% from Northern Europe, 28% from Southern Europe, and the other 12% from Australia/New Zealand, the Middle East, Af‐ rica and Asia. ECM work on a very broad range of topics, from species distribution patterns (the most mentioned topic), to evolutionary biogeog‐ raphy, dispersal and colonization, biogeography of species’ traits, island biogeography, phylogeogra‐ phy, global change biology, marine biogeography, or paleobiogeography, among others. Their broad interests are also reflected in the fact that most ECM are also affiliated with societies focusing on diverse topics, including ecology, evolution, con‐ servation, paleontology, geography, botany, mam‐ malogy, entomology, etc. These are indeed very encouraging results that show the IBS is reaching young researchers from a wide variety of research topics and geographic locations. In general terms, the IBS is meeting ECM needs (25% responded that the IBS is doing this “very well”, 60% “fairly well”). However, there is room for improvement (15% responded “not very well”), and several suggestions were made; re‐ sponses to open‐ended questions emphasized the need for more off‐year meetings (regional meet‐ ings, workshops, etc.), more jobs/grant announce‐ ments, more travel grants, online teaching re‐ sources, more talks at the IBS meetings by younger researchers and more opportunities to meet other researchers. The IBS is already work‐ ing towards improving the services it provides to all its members, and new actions are being made to adopt suggestions. The first action was to support the IBS Early Career conference (for students and biogeogra‐ phers who have finished their PhDs in the past five years). Almost ninety young researchers partici‐ pated and had the chance to present their work, and to interact with each other and with the IBS board members. This conference was organized into ten different sessions that covered several aspects of macroecology, island biogeography, phylogeography, paleobiogeography, evolutionary biogeography and conservation biogeography. Second, we are also working towards in‐ creasing regular communication among IBS mem‐ bers. One way of doing this is through online so‐ cial networks, such as Facebook, and other web‐ based platforms (e.g. the IBS blog; http:// biogeography.blogspot.com/). Currently, the IBS has a Facebook group with ~590 members, where frontiers of biogeography 3.3, 2011 — © 2011 the authors; journal compilation © 2011 The International Biogeography Society