Caryophyllales 2015 in Berlin and the Global Caryophyllales Initiative.

ARIAS, S., BERNDSOHN, W. G., BORSCH, T., FLORES-OLVERA, H., OCHOTERENA, H., VON MERING, S. & F. O. ZULOAGA

TAXON

INT ASSOC PLANT TAXONOMY

Lugar: Viena; Año: 2015

0040-0262

The Caryophyllales 2015 conference was held at the BotanicGarden and Botanical Museum Berlin, 13?18 September 2015. Theconference aimed at fomenting and expanding the internationalCaryophyllales network, bringing together researchers from all overthe world and initiating new collaborations. More than 80 colleaguesfrom 18 countries participated in the conference. During the first threedays current research was presented in talks in eleven sessions rangingfrom phylogeny, adaptive evolution, morphology, classifications,to floristic diversity and conservation (see http://caryophyllales.org/caryophyllales2015 for details). The following two days were dedicatedto workshops introducing biodiversity informatics tools (theEDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy, the JACQ herbarium managementsystem and Xper2 for creating botanical descriptions and identificationkeys) and working group meetings discussing ongoing work inselected plant groups (Sileneae Network, Cactaceae, Nyctaginaceae).In the past decades, scientific meetings focussing on Caryophyllaleswere organised at irregular intervals. During the XIIth InternationalBotanical Congress in Leningrad in 1975 the symposium?Evolution of centrospermous families? was held. A new circumscriptionof the order was discussed and broadly agreed upon (Mabry& Behnke, 1976). In July 1992, some 30 specialists from differentfields (plant morphology to organic chemistry) gathered in Heidelberg,Germany, for a symposium?organized by H.-D. Behnke andC. Mabry?on the ?Evolution and systematics of the Caryophyllales?(Behnke & Mabry, 1994). Almost 20 years later, in September 2012,the symposium ?Caryophyllales ? New insights into the phylogeny,systematics and morphological evolution of the order? was organizedby A. Sukhorukov and colleagues at the Lomonosov State UniversityMoscow, Russia.The recent conference in Berlin marked the starting point fora series of more regular Caryophyllales meetings. Colleagues fromthe Instituto de Biología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México(UNAM) offered to host the next Caryophyllales conference in 2018