David E. Schindel's Blog (16)

Border inspectors and wildlife officials around the world are constantly on the lookout for endangered species that are being killed and trafficked in violation of national laws and international treaties.  Sometimes the objects are easily identified as coming from a particular endangered species but many cannot be identified, even by expert taxonomists.  ‘Bushmeat’ is often trafficked as dried smoked meat that has been removed from bones that might have diagnostic features.  Endangered…

The Adelaide Conference is now in full swing after two days of pre-conference training sessions and the opening plenary session.  The organizers squeezed a few more 'side-meetings' into the lunch hour and the rooms were packed!  I attended one devoted to practlcal applications of barcoding and there were about 60 representatives from private companies and government agencies.  I expected to hear about the need for a handheld barcoder or bureaucratic obstacles and legal barriers to…

The final agenda for the Adelaide Barcode Conference will be released this week and you’ll see that it will be a busy week.  Even with all the parallel sessions and evening social events, the organizers had additional requests for meeting rooms.  We’ve organized these into ‘side meetings’ because they won’t be scheduled opposite any plenary or technical sessions so they won’t compete for your attention.  Most of them will be held from 13:00 to 14:00 during the lunch break.  We hope…

Registration for the Fourth International Barcode of Life Conference in Adelaide, South Australia (28 November - 3 December 2011) is about to surpass the records for all past conferences.

The 2007 Taipei…

The Program Committee of the Adelaide Barcode Conference has finished the massive job of reviewing 493 abstracts and organizing them into sessions.  This task was completed by members of the Conference Program Committee and about 40 volunteer Session Organizers who will be chairing sessions at the Conference.  The Conference organizers offer them a big THANK YOU for their contributions.

You can see the resulting …

The organizers of the Fourth International Barcode of Life Conference issued calls for abstracts and applications for travel bursaries at the beginning of April 2011 and due to the high number of responses the deadlines were extended into July.  By the time the last submissions arrived through the online system, the response totaled more than double those of previous barcode conferences.  We received:

• 490 abstracts…

Interest in the Fourth International Barcode of Life Conference is running very high so the organizers want to be sure that everyone has a chance to participate.  Accordingly, the original 15 May deadline for submission of abstracts has been extended to 15 June.  The deadline for …

Barcoding is a global enterprise and Barcode Conferences have attracted participants from around the world. The Mexico City Conference brought together 350 people from more than 50 countries. Approximately 60 of the participants from developing countries received travel support. The Adelaide Conference organizers hope to be able to support at least 30 doctoral students, researchers, and officials from developing countries, contingent on the success of fund-raising…

CBOL has posted the call for abstracts for the Fourth International Barcode of Life Conference on the Conference website, along with the outline agenda for the conference week.  The online submission form will be available until the submission deadline at midnight (Washington, DC time) on Sunday, 15 May 2011.

There will be no invited speakers other than the keynote address given by an individual…

The CBOL Secretariat Office has now officially started down the long road that will lead to the Fourth International Barcode of Life Conference in Adelaide, South Australia during the week of 26 November to 3 December.  Please keep an eye on the conference website (www.dnabarcodes2011.org) and the Connect network (under Events) for more information.  The conference website is now open and we'll be updating it constantly as the conference…

FOURTH INTERNATIONAL BARCODE OF LIFE CONFERENCE, UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA, DURING THE WEEK OF 28 NOVEMBER 2011!

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This week's issue of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology includes a Community Page devoted to barcoding. The article developed out of the half-day pre-conference symposium that was sponsored by Canada's International Reserch Development Centre (IDRC) at the Mexico City Barcode of Life Conference. You'll see that the article provides:

• An introduction to DNA barcoding,
• An…

ECBOL, the European Consortium for the Barcode of Life, was created in 2007 and will hold its second conference (EC BOL2; http://ecbol2.bio.uminho.pt/) on June 2-4 in Braga, Portugal. To help prepare for the conference, the Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures (CBS, Utrecht, Netherlands) hosted a two-day meeting of the Network of European Leading Labs (NELL),…

There is an alphabet soup of UN Conventions dealing with biodiversity and one of CBOL's roles is to promote barcoding in all of them. In representing barcoding to these international conventions, CBOL is trying to do several things:

• Raise awareness about how barcoding can be used to document and protect biodiversity,
• Promoting global involvement in barcoding,
• Removing obstacles and dispelling misinformation, and
• Looking for opportunities for partners,…