Symposium summary: Hot topics in biogeography and ecology

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ISSN 1948‐6596 news and update The final talk in the session, presented by Leticia Ochoa‐Ochoa, used the golden toad story (Bufo periglenes) as a case study to evaluate how some science stories influence the media, and peoples’ resulting perception of biodiversity loss. She and her colleagues explored the emergence of the words “biodiversity crisis,” in the media from the 1987 to 1992, and suggest that the toad was instrumental in shifting society’s perception of biodiversity loss. More broadly, they emphasized that conservation biogeographers (and conserva‐ tion biologists in general) know little about how the media perceives their work and the impact it could have on societal views towards the conser‐ vation of biological diversity. In summary, these talks touched on many of the themes and challenges to conservation bio‐ geography outlined by Ladle and Whittaker (2011). A critical challenge is to implement and disseminate the new knowledge and tools to con‐ servation practitioners and the public. Catherine H. Graham 1 & Leone M. Brown 2 Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, New York, USA. e‐mails: 1 cgraham@life.bio.sunysb.edu, lbrown@life.bio.sunysb.edu; http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/ grahamlab/ References Ladle, R.J. & Whittaker, R.J., eds. (2011). Conservation Biogeography. Wiley‐Blackwell, Oxford. Whittaker, R.J., Araujo, M.B., Paul, J., Ladle, R.J., Wat‐ son, J.E.M. & Willis, K.J. (2005). Conservation Biogeography: assessment and prospect. Diver‐ sity and Distributions, 11, 3‐23. Edited by Michael N Dawson symposium summary Hot topics in biogeography and ecology A contributed session at the 5th International Biogeography Society Conference – Heraklion, Greece, 7–11 January 2011 The “hot topics” session of the Meeting of the In‐ ternational Biogeography Society (IBS) aimed to highlight new developments and ideas in the field of biogeography. While there was no pre‐ determined theme linking the presentations, sev‐ eral topics were raised by several presentations during the session. For example, it was apparent that molecular data have become increasingly in‐ strumental to furthering our understanding of bio‐ geography, including distribution patterns, disper‐ sal routes, historic events, ecological trait varia‐ tion and community assembly. In addition, multid‐ isciplinary studies (e.g. drawing data from ecology, morphology, climatology, geology, species distri‐ butions and molecular phylogenies) employing recent methodological advances were shown to provide a deeper understanding of several long‐ standing questions in biogeography and mac‐ roecology. Here, we summarize the presentations that made up the session and attempt to highlight their significance. In recent years it has become increasingly apparent that long‐distance dispersal events are responsible for the disjunct distributions of many organismal groups (de Queiroz 2005). What have been less explored are the factors that facilitate such dispersal—and subsequent colonization— events. Peter Linder and colleagues used a dated phylogeny of danthonioid grasses to infer their long‐distance dispersal routes. This allowed them to explore the effects of factors such as dispersal distance, prevailing wind direction, the nature of dispersal routes and the age of source areas on the probability of long‐distance colonization events, of which the age was the main explana‐ tory factor. The field of community phylogenetics (Webb et al. 2002) has provided novel tools to recover patterns in ecology and species distribu‐ tion. Employing such tools, Catherine Graham and colleagues presented their work on patterns of morphological variation in hummingbirds across © 2011 the authors; journal compilation © 2011 The International Biogeography Society — frontiers of biogeography 3.1, 2011