Whither biogeography, and whence? Bringing our subject together

Abstract

editorial ISSN 1948‐6596 Whither biogeography, and whence? Bringing our subject to‐ gether Biogeography encompasses the study of all pat‐ terns of life on Earth in both space and time. As such, although it is typically classified within ‘Ecology and Evolution’ (e.g. Figure 1), it is argua‐ bly broader than its category; certainly it extends beyond. Biogeography represents one of the most transdisciplinary (and often interdisciplinary) fields within science, for it merges information from current environment and distribution of spe‐ cies with palaeontological and molecular data on their historical distribution and evolutionary rela‐ tionships, as well as information about the geo‐ logical evolution of islands and continents, and past and future trends in climate. Biogeographers use information from all these fields of science, illustrated by the fact that both Global Ecology and Biogeography and Journal of Biogeography are classified within the Physical Geography cate‐ gory of Thomson Reuters’ JCR 1 , which is predomi‐ nantly ‘Geosciences’ (see Figure 1). There are in‐ creasingly frequent links with journals specializing in computer science, climatology, microbiology and geophysics (mostly not captured by Figure 1, which uses a dataset ending in 2005). Research in biogeography, then, is not only broad but also highly diverse. The great diversity of approaches to re‐ search in biogeography is reflected by the general aim of the International Biogeography Society (IBS) of fostering communication between re‐ searchers working on all aspects of biogeography. Apart from Frontiers of Biogeography—which is an integral part of the IBS strategy along with the blog 2 , twitter 3 and facebook 4 pages—a key tool used by the IBS for strengthening links between biogeographers is international conferences. Dur‐ ing the next six months there will be two interna‐ tional IBS meetings: the IBS Special Meeting on the Geography of Species Associations 5 (Montreal, 15–17 November 2013) and the IBS Early Career 1 http://thomsonreuters.com/journal‐citation‐reports/ 2 http://biogeography.blogspot.co.uk/ 3 https://twitter.com/Biogeography 4 https://www.facebook.com/groups/6908354463/ Conference 2014 6 (Canberra, 08–10 January 2014). More information on these conferences is in the announcements section of this issue. The ‘main’, biennial conference—the IBS International Meet‐ ing 7 —is perhaps the main event in many bio‐ geographers’ calendars. It aims to bring together researchers from all fields within biogeography, who present their most exciting and cutting‐edge research. The abstract book of the last IBS confer‐ ence (Hortal et al. 2012) provides an overview of the wide variety of topics, study subjects and methodological approaches used by biogeogra‐ phers, though some subjects were under‐ represented (e.g. deep‐time biogeography). This conference is therefore the best showcase for the subject as a whole, and an excellent opportunity to get up to date with the latest advances across its breadth. But is also a place for discussion; both the symposia and the parallel sessions that are held during the conference are intended to allow scientific debate and set up the basis of future research in biogeography. Needless to say, many personal meetings over a coffee or (more fre‐ quently, to tell the truth) a beer are also an inte‐ gral part of this process. This makes the IBS bien‐ nial conference the perfect melting pot for the research ideas that will drive our science forward through the next years. Frontiers of Biogeography has previously tried to provide an update of the IBS conferences through symposium summaries that covered the main discussions and trends in each session (Dawson et al. 2011; see e.g. Jenkins and Ricklefs 2011; Sfenthourakis and Svenning 2011). But in this issue, for the Miami meeting held in January 2013, we are offering something quite different. Rather than collecting a series of separate sum‐ maries of the discussions held in the meeting, Mi‐ chael Dawson has coordinated the chairpeople from all the sessions (symposia and parallel ses‐ 5 http://ibsmontreal.webs.com/ 6 http://www.biogeography.org/html/Meetings/2014ECC/ 7 http://www.biogeography.org/html/Meetings/index.html frontiers of biogeography 5.2, 2013 — © 2013 the authors; journal compilation © 2013 The International Biogeography Society