The 2020 Chinese National Symposium on Systematic and Evolutionary Botany

Abstract

On 26–28 November 2020, the Chinese National Symposium on Systematic and Evolutionary Botany (also known as the 14th Young Scholar's Symposium) was held at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Menglun, Yunnan Province, China. The symposium was sponsored by the Botanical Society of China (BSC), and was organized by Professor Yao-Wu Xing from XTBG. The series has been held every other year regularly in the last decade. More than 500 participants from 141 institutes/universities gathered in XTBG to attend the symposium in person, and there were also more than 200 online participants. The symposium brought together the plant systematics and evolutionary biology community in China to discuss the advances in systematics, biodiversity resources and conservation, and evolutionary biology in general. Four workshops were launched on 25 November, covering “Taxonomy of tropical plants”, “Inference of divergence times”, “Organelle genome assembly and analyses”, and “Plant evolutionary genomics”. At the Opening Ceremony on 26 November, Professor Jin Chen (Director of XTBG), Professor Xiao-Quan Wang (Vice Chairman of BSC, and Director of Institute of Botany, CAS), and Professor De-Yuan Hong (Academician of CAS) addressed the symposium. The symposium also included four colloquia on “Plant taxonomy and resources”, “Paleobotany”, “Phylogenetics and biogeography”, and “Speciation and adaptive evolution”, in four concurrent sessions. There were 130 contributed oral presentations and 47 posters. Before the Closing Ceremony on 28 November, ten young investigators presented plenary talks in addition to the three plenary speeches delivered by more established scientists. In closing, Professor De-Zhu Li (Kunming Institute of Botany, CAS) provided a summary on the symposium, and Professor De-Yuan Hong made an appeal for innovative evaluation of the basic sciences, inspiring young botanists to confront the challenges facing the discipline of plant taxonomy. The symposium was very successful and well attended by many young systematists and evolutionary biologists (Fig. 1). Throughout the three days, there were very active exchanges in the form of questions/answers, discussions, and comments. The next Chinese National Symposium on Systematic and Evolutionary Botany was proposed to be held in South China Botanical Garden, CAS in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China in 2022.