Announcements ISSN 1948-6596 IBS biennial meeting: abstract deadline is 10 th October The 7 th Biennial Meeting will be held 8–12 th Janu- ary 2015 in Bayreuth Germany 1 . The local hosts at the University of Bayreuth and the program com- mittee are completing the details of the meeting as we approach the deadline for abstract submis- sion (10 th October); review of abstracts will begin shortly after that date. Also, remember that although the deadlines for early registration and student travel award applications were 30th September, you can still register (regular fee) and add or remove supple- mental activities (field trips and workshops). Field trip registration is open until 30 th November. Workshop registration will remain open until the workshops fill. The meeting The format of IBS’s biennial meetings is centered on four plenary symposia. At this meeting, we are introducing two minor variations to the original format of two days of plenary symposia followed by one day of contributed talks. First, we are breaking up the symposia to span all three days, so that on two days there will be a plenary sympo- sium in the morning, followed by contributed talks in the afternoon, and a poster session in the eve- ning. Second, prior to each poster session, and convened in the large auditorium, there will be one hour of “lightning talks” of about 40 rapid-fire presentations of the highlights of certain posters. If you wish to participate in this, select “poster with lightning talk” when submitting an abstract. We can accommodate only 40 such presentations each day. For the Bayreuth conference, IBS also has increased the capacity for oral contributed pres- entations (15 minutes in length), while maintain- ing only four concurrent sessions. Abstracts will be reviewed by small committees assigned to each of the disciplinary themes. These committees will make every attempt to achieve fair and quick de- cisions. For workshops, we recommend visiting the conference web pages for an updated description of the BioGeoBEARS workshop, which is on meth- ods and software for historical biogeographic analyses. Attendees of this workshop will learn how to build and test models in BioGeoBEARS, as well as necessary basic skills in R and statistical model choice. A second pre-conference workshop will fo- cus on the ‘next generation’ in species-distribution modelling. It will provide an introduction to emerging themes that represent current frontiers in SDM research. Theoretical overviews and prac- tical examples will be related to these emerging fields. Intense exercises will allow hands-on ex- perience with data and software and provide use- ful R scripts for future use. After the conference, on Monday 13 th a workshop is aiming to link the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2 (IPBES) and biogeography. IPBES participants will present insights into the first set of assessments to be presented and voted on during the same week at the plenary of IPBES-3, in Bonn. Structure, tasks, and perspectives of IPBES will be discussed. Upcoming calls for working groups will be pre- sented. Furthermore, the review process and the political nature of IPBES will be addressed. The fourth workshop is on the integrative analysis of spatial biodiversity data and the ‘Map of Life 3 . Participants will consider pitfalls of (and solutions for) spatial biodiversity data analysis in fields encompassing biodiversity and ecological informatics, species distribution modeling, species niche characterization, species richness analyses, trait biogeography, and conservation assess- ments. Particular emphasis will be given to occu- pancy-based and Bayesian models. New tools in the Map of Life infrastructure will be introduced. The surroundings The city of Bayreuth offers a setting of historical 1 http://www.bayceer.uni-bayreuth.de/ibs2015/, last accessed 26/09/2014 2 http://www.ipbes.net/, last accessed 26/09/2014 3 http://www.mappinglife.org/, last accessed 26/09/2014 frontiers of biogeography 6.3, 2014 — © 2014 the authors; journal compilation © 2014 The International Biogeography Society