On November 14th and 15th the Biodiversity Heritage Library hosted the Life and Literature Conference, which brought together interested parties in a variety of disciplines, including science, education, informatics, and the humanities to generate conversations about the priorities for biodiversity literature digitization. Lively discussions and insightful presentations ensued both days, with dozens of live tweets (hashtag #lifelit) constantly streaming for those who could not participate in person. The conference was divided into four panel discussions, followed on the second day by break-out sessions that allowed attendees to delve deeply into the various topics discussed during panel sessions, ultimately leading to an outline of the various areas deemed most important for BHL to focus on in the next 4-5 years. The four panel sessions included "Research, Informatics, and the Published Record;" "Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors - New Models and Access;" "Learning and Education;" and "Building Collaborative Networks for Science and the Humanities through Scientific Literature." A synopsis of the four panels can be found on the Life and Literature site, as well as a list of each of the presenters and their biographies. Session presentations are being loaded to the BHL wiki and can be accessed on the Presentations page. Notes from the sessions can be found on the Life and Literature website. You can also view interviews of conference attendees on the website.

Image courtesy Martin Kalfatovic. George Dyson delivering the second plenary speech at Life and Literature

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Life and Literature conference continued on November 16th with a smaller meeting with the goal to organize an African BHL and African contributions to EOL. This meeting had representatives from Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, and South Africa. The meeting was hosted by BioSynC and sponsored by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation.

The two day Life and Literature conference successfully began this morning!

The conference convenes librarians, biologists, computer scientists, publishers, students, and other stakeholders to set the agenda for biodiversity literature digitizing and its networked environment for the next four to five years.

View an online conference schedule here and follow the meeting on the Life and Literature twitter feed, @life_lit.

CONUS SYNTHESIS MEETING, 25 – 29 OCTOBER 2011

During the last week of October the Biodiversity Synthesis Center at the Field Museum Chicago hosted an IUCN Red List workshop on behalf of the University of York, UK. The purpose of the meeting was to assess threats to over 640 species of cone snails, one of the largest assessments undertaken for this purpose at a single session.

Conus, being the largest genus of marine invertebrates, is of special significance to biodiversity. Occurring primarily in tropical coastal waters, these snails are predatory and capture their meals of fish, molluscs or worms using complex neurotoxins delivered through detached ‘harpoons’ evolved from their radulae. The toxins, which possibly number in excess of 50,000 across the genus, are of considerable interest to biomedical science with drugs already on the market for the treatment of intractable pain and with many other applications in research. To date, less that 1% of toxins have been characterized. Conus confronts the same threats from fishing, pollution and habitat loss as other tropical marine taxa, but with a carnivorous diet, these gastropod molluscs are at a trophic level where habitat degradation also carries special significance in its potential for reducing prey abundance and disrupting the food chain.

In September 2011, 21 delegates representing 9 online biodiversity reporting projects (and one citizen science research project) from six regions of the globe met in Milton Keynes, UK, to talk about data sharing, compare and exchange free or shareable content and tools, plan next generation development to connect their projects more closely, discuss user experience, recruiting, content management, copyright, fundraising and other shared challenges, and document best practices.

The meeting is expected to result in jointly-authored papers about citizen scientist motivation and behavior, several collaborative grant proposals, and assorted experiments in cross-platform data sharing. Slide presentations from the meeting are available here.

This meeting was co-sponsored by BioSynC, the EOL Learning + Educaiton Group, and the EOL Species Pages Group.

Today begins the "Assessing the status of cone snails" working group at BioSynC. During this meeting, cone snail experts will review and update data on the status of cone snails. Participants include specialists in taxonomy, biology, ecology, and conservation together with representation from pharmacology and bio-medical sciences. It also includes interested parties from the marine curio trade who have specialist knowledge on the sourcing of shells used as raw materials for manufacture of jewelry and crafts, and as specimen shells for the serious collector and casual tourist sectors.

In mid October, Zoology Curator Rüdiger Bieler hosted the Third Annual Meeting of the participants of the NSF-funded "Bivalves-in-Time-and Space" project (see http://bivatol.org/bits) at the Biodiversity Synthesis Center. The BiTS projects to develop bivalves as a preeminent model for macroevolutionary studies. The meeting focused on the phylogenetic analyses of morphological and molecular data in two large groups of clams (cockles/Cardiidae and venus clams/Veneridae) and brought collaborators from throughout the U.S. and The Netherlands to the Museum.

Despite a rainy morning, the Carex meeting has a successful start!

The sedges of genus Carex, at 2100 species worldwide, comprise one of the largest angiosperm genera. The Regional and Global diversity of Carex meeting brings together sedge taxonomists from 10 countries and botanists from the Western Great Lakes region to coordinate the creation of work on taxonomy and species pages for the genus, create online keys to Carex of the Western Great Lakes region, and initiate creation of an online portal to the entire family Cyperaceae (5000 species worldwide). The meeting aims ultimately at producing an authoritative resource for Cyperaceae data worldwide, integrating understanding from global and regional perspectives.

We wish all participants a good and productive meeting!

Photo: Bruce McAdam, cc-by-sa