Keynote Address — A Census of All Life

by Paul Hebert, University of Guelph

Despite 250 years of scientific effort, most species remain unknown. However, the last three decades have seen a radical advance in our understanding of biodiversity, reflecting the increasing ease of accessing DNA sequences. The earliest and most dramatic impacts involved the smallest organisms. Twenty years ago, DNA analysis provided the first glimpses of vast empires of tiny life - archaeal, bacterial and protistan. However, it is now clear that sequence diversity in short genomic regions, DNA barcodes, can also be a powerful tool in revealing the diversity of multi-cellular life, by easing the identification of known species and expediting the discovery of new ones. Motivated by a desire to understand biodiversity and the forces that have shaped it, a major DNA barcode program is now underway. Expect a barcode library for 500K species by 2015. Expect automated systems supporting both field identifications and massive biodiversity screens by 2020. Expect a barcoded world by 2030.

A native of Kingston (Ontario), Paul completed a BSc in biology at Queen’s University, a PhD in genetics at Cambridge University and postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Sydney and the Natural History Museum (UK). He has held faculty positions at the University of Windsor and at the University of Guelph where he is now a Canada Research Chair in Molecular Biodiversity. Over his career, Paul has served as Director of the Great Lakes Institute in Windsor, as Chair of the Department of Zoology at Guelph, and of the Huntsman Marine Science Centre in St. Andrews. He is currently Director of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario and of the Canadian Barcode of Life Network. He has published more than 300 papers, has received several national and international scientific awards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

 

Plenary Session

 

A Panel on Biodiversity Informatics Megastrategies: A Global Vision

 

Moderator: James Macklin, Director of Collections and Informatics, Harvard University Herbaria

 

James Macklin has been the Director of Collections and Informatics at the Harvard University Herbaria in Cambridge, Massachusetts for four years. Previously, he spent six years at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as the manager of the botanical collections where he and his colleagues rehoused the collection and developed databasing and imaging projects. James obtained a Ph.D. in Plant Systematics from the University of Western Ontario in 2001. James continues to do systematic work in the Rosaceae (Rose Family) on hawthorns and blackberries, examining the complex morphological variability generated through the influence of polyploidy, apomixis and hybridization. James has also been an enthusiastic participant and leader in many national and international biodiversity informatics initiatives. He and his colleagues at Harvard are currently funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a prototype network technology (the “Filtered Push”) that will enhance discovery and use of natural history collection data, reduce duplicative capture effort, and enhance data quality. He has also recently co-hosted a workshop and co-chaired a GBIF task group (Global Strategy and Action Plan: Digitizing Natural History Collections) looking into technological and social bottlenecks preventing efficient specimen data capture.

 

Panelists, in alphabetical order:

Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility (CBIF)

Guy Baillargeon

Guy Baillargeon started in career as Research Scientist for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, after completion of his doctoral studies in Systematic Botany at the Berlin Freie Universität (Germany) in 1986. Guy is currently Node manager for the Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility (CBIF).  Over the year he led the development of several Web applications in the area of systematics and biodiversity at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, including the international, multilingual version of the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) of United-States, Canada and Mexico, supporting multiple interfaces, multiple classifications, automated web-portal functions and XML services. Since 2001, Guy has been actively involved in the GBIF Governing Board, and served on many GBIF committees, particularly as chair the Nodes committee (2002-2004).   He is currently chairing the Species 2000 Global Team, and is one of the editors of the Catalogue of Life Annual Checklist of Species 2000 and ITIS.  Since 2006 Guy is also member of the Board of Directors of the Flora of North America Association.

 

European biodiversity informatics initiatives

Walter G. Berendsohn

Walter Berendsohn is a botanist directing the Department of Biodiversity Informatics and Laboratories at the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem. Walter started his career as a consultant and later research director of the Botanical Garden La Laguna in El Salvador, C.A., where he organised and administered the herbarium, the library, and participation in research projects from 1983 to 1990. Since 1992, Walter has coordinated a number of projects, mostly related to Biodiversity Informatics, among them the Biological Collections Access Service for Europe, BioCASE. Among other activities concerning the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, he chairs a GBIF task group aiming at a Strategy and Action Plan for the Digitization of Natural History Collections.

 

In the European arena, Walter currently leads the workpackage Platform for Cybertaxonomy of EDIT (European Distributed Institute for Taxonony), the related databasing and harmonisation activities in the PESI (Pan European Species Inventories) project, the Construction Plan Strategy workpackage in LifeWatch, and the activity “Consolidating the Information Network of European Natural History Collections” in SYNTHESYS.

Canadensys

Anne Bruneau

Anne Bruneau has been a faculty member in the department of biological sciences at the Université de Montréal and researcher at the Institut de recherche en biologie végétale (IRBV) since 1995.  She is director of the Montréal Biodiversity Centre, which focuses on biodiversity research and training and conservation of biological collections.  She obtained a Ph.D. in plant systematics at Cornell University in 1993 and was a NERC Taxonomy Initiative Advanced Research Fellow in the U.K. before arriving in Montréal. Her primary research interests are in plant systematics, phylogeny and evolutionary biology.  Research projects in her laboratory focus on the systematics of the plant family Leguminosae and of native North American roses, and employ a diversity of techniques, from morphological to molecular.  Phylogenetic analyses are used as a framework to examine hypotheses on floral evolution, biogeographical patterns, evolution of polyploidy and the importance of hybridisation in the diversification of various taxonomic groups.

 

With colleagues from a number of universities across Canada, Anne Bruneau initiated the Canadensys biodiversity information network aimed at widely disseminating specimen data from Canadian biological collections.

 

American Bioinformatics Initiatives

John R. Wieczorek

John Wieczorek is an Information Architect at the University of California Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology where he was originally hired to bring the museum's collections data to the web. He has since been involved in the development of the Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR) protocol and his leadership has been instrumental in developing community-based, distributed database networks for terrestrial vertebrates - MaNIS for mammals, HerpNET for amphibians and reptiles, and ORNIS for birds. He was lead programmer and project manager for the web-based program BioGeomancer, which makes it possible to assign latitude and longitude to biodiversity data records originally collected without such information by converting verbal descriptions to numerical spatial data. He is convenor of the Darwin Core Task Group, which successfully brought this biodiversity data standard to ratification in October 2009.

In 2006, John received the 2006 Ebbe Nielsen Prize, presented by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This prestigious award recognizes John's leadership and seminal contributions in the field of biodiversity informatics, including his role in development of distributed data networks (e.g., MaNIS, HerpNET, and ORNIS), best practices for georeferencing, and Darwin Core.

 

Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Vishwas Chavan

Dr. Vishwas Chavan is the Senior Programme Officer at the Secretariat of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Secretariat in Copenhagen. His primary responsibility is to device strategies on increased discovery and mobilization of primary biodiversity data. These include strategies for demand driven prioritization of natural history collections data discovery and publishing. Prior to his appointment at GBIF, Vishwas led a vibrant and dynamic group in the area of biodiversity informatics at the Pune-based National Chemical Laboratory. Before joining NCL, he served at the Goa-based National Institute of Oceanography (1991-1998), and later at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad (1998-2000). Thus, he brings in rich experience of over 19 years of pursuing biodiversity and ecosystem informatics in a mega-biodiversity and developing nation, India. His recent interest is to develop 'data publishing framework' that would overcome social, political and cultural barriers in expediting discovery and publishing of primary biodiversity data. For more details about Vishwas Chavan, visit http://www.vishwaschavan.com/.

 

Scientific Symposia

Dispersal in Fungi and Plants 

     Co-sponsored by the CBA/ABC Mycology Section & Systematics and Phytogeography Section

     Organized by: Hugues Massicotte, Shannon Berch & Tim Dickinson

 

Roles and Status of Canadian Herbaria

     Co-sponsored by the CBA/ABC Systematics and Phytogeography Section & Mycology Section

     Organized by: Tim Dickinson, Hugues Massicotte & Shannon Berch

1) Mary Berbee -  "Capturing the missing diversity among BC fungi and a plan to build understanding of fungal belowground ecology"

2) Dan McDevit - "Acquiring DNA sequence data from dried archival (type) red algal collections for the purpose of applying specific
                           epithets to contemporary molecular species: a critical assessment"

3) Jacques Cayouette - "Changing values of Canadian herbaria from the 19th to the 21st century"

4) Deb Metsger - "Tapping the international herbarium network to 'plant' Life in Crisis: the Schad Gallery of Biodiversity, at the ROM"

5) Hugo Cota-Sanchez - "Herbarium data management and display using SPECIFY"

6) Mary Barkworth - "Less commonly known uses of herbaria"

7) Luc Brouillet - "Assessing the state and trends of biodiversity sciences (taxonomy and collections) in Canada: An introduction to the  

       Council of Canadian Academies' Expert Panel process"

8) Chris Sears - "How Canadian herbaria are being utilized in the 21st century"

9) Questions and comments from the audience for the speakers

Plant-Insect Interactions
      Sponsored by the CBA/ABC Plant Development Section

      Organized by Art Davis

1) Joseph Shorthouse, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON -

             "Manipulation of plant development by cynipid wasps attacking Canada's wild roses"

2) Reinhard Jetter, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC - "Slippery plant surfaces: from chemistry to ecology"

3) Art Davis, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK - "Flower development and nectar production in relation to insect pollination"

 

Data  Recording:  Legacy for  Biodiversity  Conservation

      Sponsored by the CBA/ABC Ecology and Conservation Section

      Organized by: Liette Vasseur & Adrianne Sinclair

This symposium will examine the issues regarding data recording and information databases from the perspectives of field ecology to museum collection and information networks.  The symposium will be followed by a follow up discussion to last years round table discussion on Species at Risk and Conservation.  This year’s discussion will address the question: Re-introduction - When, How and Where? with a focus on the issues and conditions when re-introduction is being considered in sites where a species has been extirpated.  Come  share your views and questions on this  important topic!

  

Is there a future for plants?  The UN Biodiversity Convention’s Global Strategy for Plant Conservation

     Organized by: David A. Galbraith, Head of Science, Royal Botanical Gardens & Danna J. Leaman, Research Associate, Canadian Museum of Nature &

                            Chair, IUCN-SSC Medicinal Plant Specialist Group

The aim of this symposium is to promote engagement in the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) in the professional botanical community in Canada.  Despite being in its 8th year as a strategy of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and considerable work promoting it by some sectors, overall awareness of the GSPC in Canada remains low.  The GSPC is now going through the final stages of a peer-review and revision process, culminating hopefully in the adoption of the revised strategy by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, meeting in Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010.  As 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, it seems fitting to highlight the GSPC and to seek new and exciting pathways to engagement with a variety of sectors in Canada.

1) Ole Hendrickson, Science Advisor, Biodiversity Convention Office, Environment Canada -

              "The once and future strategy:  the global response to the plant conservation crisis"

2) David A. Galbraith, Head of Science, Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton, ON -

           "Canada's response to the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation"

3) Ernest Small, Principal Research Scientist, National Program on Environmental Health - Biodiversity, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada,          Ottawa - "Superstar plants as a key to public and political support for conservation"

4) Ken Farr, Canadian Forest Service, CITES Scientific Authority- "CITES as a tool for sustainable use of plants"

5) Kate Davis, ABS Advisor, Botanic Gardens Conservation International - "The CBD in practice: what does it mean for collections?"

Weresub Lecture

The Weresub Lecture is an annual CBA/ABC lecture sponsored by the CBA Mycology Section, who select and invite a distinguished scientist working in a mycology-related discipline to deliver the lecture at the annual CBA/ABC meeting.  It is named in honour of Dr. Luella K. Weresub (1919-1979), a well-known mycologist who worked at the Biosystematics Research Institute of Agriculture Canada.

Irwin (Ernie) Brodo

Research Lichenologist Emeritus

Canadian Museum of Nature

 

Travels with a Lichenologist In my perambulations over the years while working as a lichen taxonomist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, I have encountered dozens of especially interesting and often significant lichens. This talk will review some of the most fascinating of these, placed in a somewhat chronological, and geographic, context.

 

Special Lecture on Teaching

Dr. Kate Frego of the University of New Brunswick, St John campus, and winner of a 3M Teaching fellowship in 2008 will be presenting a special lecture at the conference, hosted by the CBA-ABC Teaching Section.  All are invited to attend!

Calling or Culling: The Influence of our Teaching Metaphors

As scientists and educators, we all have a metaphor for what we do, whether we make it explicit or not. Are students empty vessels to be filled? Logs waiting for the kindling to set them alight? Applicants for a special club with limited membership? Our metaphors for teaching are windows into who we are and how we relate to our students. My own journey as an educator has been strongly influenced by my reflection on the metaphors I have used. Analysis of them has provided insight into my teaching “weak points”, and the reciprocal way in which my metaphors shape my life as my life shapes my metaphors.

 

Teaching Panel Discussion

The CBA-ABC Teaching Section is proud to host this Panel Discussion. The panelists from institutions across Canada, all of whom have been recognized for teaching excellence, will discuss aspects of teaching and learning as these processes occur in different settings and will engage the audience in discussion of ideas and technologies that work in three different teaching environments. 

Best Botanical Teaching Practices: Reaching Students in the Classroom, Lab, and Field

The panel, moderated by Frédérique Guinel (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Vipen Sawhney (University of Saskatchewan):

• Mihai Costea, Wilfrid Laurier University
• Art Davis, University of Saskatchewan,
• Kate Frego, University of New Brunswick,
• Larry Peterson, University of Guelph, and
• Jane Young, University of Northern British Columbia