A summit of cladistics: abstracts of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society and VIII Reunion Argentina de Cladistica y Biogeografia

SZUMIK, CLAUDIA; GOLOBOFF, PABLO

CLADISTICS (PRINT)

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Año: 2009 vol. 26 p. 202 - 226

0748-3007

The 27th meeting of the Willi Hennig Society was held at the Sierras de San Javier, Tucuman (27–31 October 2008), jointly with the VIII Reunion Argentina de Cladı ́ stica y Biogeografı́a. This was the second Hennig meeting held in South America and the third inLatin America. The event was attended by 129 participants from 16 countries, with the strongest presence from Argentina, USA andBrazil. As pointed out in the minutes of previous meetings, student participation is a good measure of the health of a society, and bythis measure, the Hennig society is doing very well. For this meeting, 64 of the participants (50%) were students, 40 of which hadauthored or co-authored a talk or poster. The schedule was intense, with 98 presentations (67 talks and 31 posters). The sessionsconsisted of contributed papers, and five symposia on diverse topics: Large Scale Analyses of Large Chunks of Life, MolecularSystematics, Latin American Biogeography in the 21st Century, Methodology, and Botanical Phylogenetics (each of the symposia,except the ‘‘green’’ one, had two or three student speakers). As is usual at these meetings, the atmosphere was informal and relaxed,with much discussion and debate (although the biogeographic symposium took first place for the heat of its exchanges). The Student Award Committee (Lone Aagesen, Dan Janies and Gitte Petersen) selected Santiago Catalano for the Hennig Award ("Theoptimization of landmark data: a three-dimensional approach"), Prashant Sharma for the Brundin Award ("Phylogenetic analysis ofSandokanidae (Arachnida, Opiliones, Laniatores): Evaluating the independence of associated gene regions"), and SebastianBarrionuevo for the Rosen Award ("Continuous characters in a phylogenetic analysis of the frog genus Telmatobius"). In addition tothe logistics and funding provided by the Willi Hennig Society, the event was supported by the Consejo Nacional de InvestigacionesCientıficas y Tecnicas, Fundacion Miguel Lillo, Instituto Superior de Entomologıa ÔDr Abraham Willink’, and the Agencia Nacionalde Promocion Cientıfica y Tecnologica.