IAPT Early Career Investigator Symposium 2019: Life at the Edge

IAPT has established a symposium series called the Early Career Investigator Symposium to highlight the research of botanists, mycologists, and phycologists. Each year the symposium will be presented at a different international conference where IAPT participates in the program. The specific theme will vary from year to year, depending on the theme of the conference. This year the theme for our symposium at the Botany 2019 conference is “Life at the Edge,” which fits quite well with the conference theme “Sky Islands & Desert Seas.”

Taxa occupying evolutionarily novel habitats, whether these fit into our conventional concepts of extreme environments (e.g. deserts, mountaintops, polar regions) or are “extreme” only relative to the ancestral habitats of the lineage (e.g. forest canopy, temperate climates, land), must evolve new solutions to the challenges of survival and reproduction. Understanding how these taxa adapted to their novel niches and the impacts of this habitat shift on species biology and the process of speciation offers a fascinating window on evolution: insight both into events of the past, and events we might anticipate as human-caused global change places more and more species into evolutionarily novel environments. This program will highlight research conducted in the fields of systematics and evolution of major clades of fungi and plants, focusing on how life has pushed the edge of what constitutes a habitable environment.

For more information, download a flyer or the abstract booklet.

Symposium organized by Tatyana Livshultz and Mauricio Bonifacino

Join us in Tucson for the symposium. Wednesday 31st July 2019, 8:15 - 12:00