Invitation to submit to AGU session B091: Putting ‘Dark Matter’ Biodiversity on the Map

[carrieseltzer]

Just the messenger here, passing on an opportunity I saw on the GBIF Forum from @kcopas that I thought might be of interest to some iNaturalist users in the academic sphere. AGU is the American Geophysical Union. It’s a huge meeting (tens of thousands of attendees) with huge breadth, including biodiversity and quite a bit of citizen science too.

@kcopas

For those of you whose work sits at the intersection of molecules and morphology, please consider submitting an abstract to a session at the 2019 AGU meeting in San Francisco that GBIF and our partners are organizing.

Session B091 . Putting 'Dark Matter’ Biodiversity on the Map : Crosslinking Metagenomics, Phylogenetics and Specimen Occurrence Data Infrastructures to Advance Scientific Understanding and Policy Relevance of Cryptic Biodiversity

Many organisms like insects, prokaryotes, fungi and viruses, lack formal Linnaean scientific names, inhabiting a huge gap between described species and true global biodiversity. These ‘dark taxa’ are essential to the biosphere, but limited knowledge of their distribution relegates them to the shadows of research and protection policies.

Advances in DNA sequencing and comparative data libraries enable observation and placement of such organisms into operational taxonomic units or directly in the tree of life without Linnaean names.

Collaboration between several international infrastructure networks is linking evidence used by biodiversity, phylogenetics and metagenomics research communities. This cross-disciplinary effort increases open biodiversity data on dark taxa, reduces data gaps and biases, and cost-effectively enhances the value of public infrastructure investments.

Combining this data with occurrences from collections, field surveys and citizen science will open unexplored research horizons, improve evidence for policy decisions, contribute toward biodiversity targets and increase scientific understanding of biodiversity.

Click here to submit an abstract for oral or poster contributions to this session. At the top of the page, click the “Submit an abstract to this session” button below the title.

The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, 31 July at 23:59 EDT.

The AGU Fall Meeting 2019 will be held in San Francisco from 9-13 December 2019. Note that you must be a registered member of AGU to submit an abstract (learn more about joining AGU).