Talks/Posters

Invitation for publication in AoB PLANTS

List of accepted talks (update 22 July 2009)

Please click here to view or print the list of accepted talks.

List of accepted posters (update 22 July 2009)

Please click here to view or print the list of accepted posters.
Note, however, that due to the limited time schedule some of the oral contributions had to be changed into posters. The talks to be presented were selected by the symposium organisers.
There is no need to be disappointed in case your offered oral contribution was changed into a poster presentation: we have saved two very attractive time windows for poster sessions, and all posters will be displayed during the entire conference.

Instructions for talks and posters

Please click here to view or print the instructions for talks and posters.

AoB PLANTS

Invitation to submit a manuscript to the special issue "Stress and Survival in Tropical Environments" of the journal Annals of Botany PLANTS
PDF-file: Invitation for publication in AoB PLANTS



Submission of abstracts
The deadline for submission of oral presentations and posters expired 30 April 2009.
Scientific session themes are displayed on this page.

List of scientific sessions and time slots
Click here to to view or print the list of scientific sessions, session leader, reviewer and allocated time slots per symposium.

The conference will cover the following symposia:



Additional Sessions

Scientific Session 1:
Plant-animal interactions: antagonistic versus mutualistic networks in changing tropical environments
Session organizers: Alexandra-Maria Klein & Nico Blüthgen
Goal of the Symposium:
Drivers of global environmental change such as land use, climate, invasion, CO2 increase or nitrogen depo-sition alter community structure and cause extinctions on antagonistic and mutualistic interactions among species. Recent advances in the analysis of interaction networks and other analytic tools may help to un-derstand the consequences of environmental changes for complex plant-animal interactions. Extremes and steep gradients of environmental changes can especially be observed in the tropics. However, analyses of networks and community stability have been mainly applied to non-tropical systems. This symposium will show advances in the understanding of tropical plant-animal interactions, but also includes studies from other bioregions for comparison. A more general goal is to work out the differences in antagonistic versus mutualistic interactions by considering the biology of species besides the perception of new analytic net-work statistics. Differences between tropical and temperate regions in the biology of plant-animal interac-tions may be detected and discussed. This symposium will emphasize the importance of considering de-tailed knowledge in the biology and ecology of species and different network statistical tools for reliable interpretations of the disturbance in community-wide interactions caused by changes in global environ-mental drivers in the tropics. It will provide an opportunity for information exchange on new network ap-proaches and inspiration and discussion of their applications without loosing the biology beyond species interaction and will synthesis and identify crucial research gaps for tropical research in the field of plant-animal interactions.

Scientific session 2:
Oilplants & oilbees: 40 years after Stefan Vogel find
Session organizers: Alves dos Santos & Isabel Cristina Machado
Goal of the Symposium:
Non-volatile fatty oil produced from certain flowers was first record in 1969 by Prof. Dr. Stefan Vogel (University of Vienna, Austria). He also discovered that certain bees were specialized to sample those floral lipids, which they use to surface their nest and feed the larvae, admixed with pollen. Now a days, we know that the oilbees account for about 330 species in the world, and it is estimated that more then 1800 plant species of 9 families offer floral oil as resource, being Malpighiaceae the most important. With this symposium we want to join some specialist researches that continued working in this subject and accumulating knowledge about the many aspects of one of the most beautiful and interesting interactions between bees and plants. We want to bring the last founds and news perspectives in this area. We also aim to use the chance to honor Prof. Stefan Vogel and the 40 years of the find of the oil syndrome and this nice phenomenon.

Scientific Session 3:
Tropical dendroecology
Session organizer: Achim Bräuning & Ute Sass-Klaassen
Goal of the Symposium:
Dendroecology has been successful applied on many tree species to detect and reconstruct environmental history in temperate and cold climate zones, whereas it has been a paradigm for many years that dendrochronological techniques are not applicable on tree species from tropical regions. Major obstacles are the lack of climate seasonality and hence the lack of distinct anatomical growth boundaries in many tropical tree species. During the last 10 years, however, considerable progress has been made in tropical dendrochronology. By using new techniques and interdisciplinary approaches seasonal seasonality in wood formation was confirmed for many tree species from various tropical ecosystems. Analyses of stable isotopes and chemical composition of growth rings gained new insight into tree biology and tree-environment interactions.
This session aims to give an overview of scientific methods and strategies applied to analyse tree species from different tropical ecosystems, reports about regional scientific progress and stresses the relevance of tropical dendroecology to study the effect of global climate change on tropical ecosystems. The selected speakers provide a spectrum of scientific approaches and applications of tropical dendroecology in different continents.

Scientific Session 4:
Tropical Wetland Ecology
Session organizers: Pia Parolin & Barbara Rudolph
Goal of the Symposium:
The focus of this symposium lies on the problem of invasions of non-native tropical species in aquatic ecosystems worldwide, considering also abiotic / biotic / human interactions, and the aspects of global change and their influence on the distribution of (tropical) invaders.
Issues that should be dealt within this symposium are:
(a) Introduction to problems caused by tropical species/neophytes/aliens being introduced to aquatic ecosystems, examples of invasion events and strategies
(b) Requirements of aliens to become invaders
(c) Facilitation of spreadout through global change and/or anthropogenic influences, perhaps combined with an introduction of an invasive database
(d) Project reports dealing with invasive species to discuss examples to more detail
(e) Possible solutions to control or inhibit the spread of invasive species

Scientific Session 5:
Changes in liana abundance in tropical forests
Session organizers: Susan G. Letcher & Stefan Schnitzer
Goal of the Symposium:
Lianas (woody vines) are an important component of tropical forests, constituting up to 40% of woody stems and woody species richness. They interact strongly with trees, competing both aboveground and belowground, causing physical damage, and altering gap-phase dynamics. Lianas respond positively to increased carbon dioxide, often to a greater degree than co-occurring trees. Lianas may also have superior drought resistance compared to trees. Evidence from long-term plots shows an increase in liana biomass over the past several decades, and models suggest that positive feedback loops could develop between liana abundance and forest disturbance, ultimately reducing tropical forest biomass as CO2 levels rise. Despite their importance in tropical forests and their strong effects on stand dynamics, lianas have received relatively little attention compared to trees.
The goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers from diverse fields to address the causes and consequences of increasing liana abundance in tropical forests. We have assembled some of the leading scholars who work on lianas, as well as young scientists beginning their careers. Presentations will cover topics from ecophysiology, biogeography, and community ecology: what are the environmental tolerances of lianas? What physiological adaptations allow lianas to be successful? how do lianas respond during forest succession? What is the abundance distribution of lianas at a landscape to continental scale, and how is it changing?

Scientific Session 6:
Context-specific consequences of animal seed dispersal: the importance of considering gradients
Session organizer: Laurence Culot & Dr. Ellen Andresen
Goal of the Symposium:
Seed dispersal by animals is the most frequent seed dispersal syndrome in tropical forests, and is wide-spread in many terrestrial ecosystems. Plant and animal characteristics, as well as emerging characteristics of the interaction itself, are highly variable, affecting seed fate in many ways. Furthermore, this plant-animal interaction occurs in a spatially and temporally changing environment. Most of the factors affecting the consequences of animal seed dispersal vary within a continuous gradient. In this symposium we will address the variability present in animal seed dispersal systems. We will show how the particular position of a factor within its gradient of possible values determines the specific context in which the outcome of the plant-animal interaction occurs. Plant- and animal-related factors and their respective gradients, that will be addressed in this symposium, include: animal size (from small to large), fruit/seed size (from small to large), life history stage (from seed to tree), dispersal distance (from short to long), and level of habitat disturbance (from low to high). Talks in the symposium will show how the gradients in the causal factors create a gradient in the response variables, which in terms of seed dispersal might extend from seed predation to highly effective dispersal. Considering the gradients of each factor as well as the gradients of responses is of paramount importance to gain a better and more realistic understanding of these plant-animal interactions, and to start addressing how they might be affected by global change.

Scientific Session 7:
Tropical Fungi & Mykorrhiza
Session Organizer: Gerhard Kost & Ingrid Kottke
Goal of the Symposium:
Fungi are playing an important role at diverse trophy levels of all terrestrial ecosystems world wide. Fungi are display enormous diversity in the tropics but characterization of the ecological importance in the tropics is still underestimated by science and society. One focus of the symposium is laid in fungus-plant interactions. The attention of mycorrhizal researchers turns belatedly to the threats to biodiversity in tropical forests, their importance in understanding the evolution and biogeography of mycorrhizal fungi, and their pivotal role in the earth's carbon cycle and climate system. The link between mycorrhizal fungal community composition and ecosystem processes, the biogeography of tropical mycorrhizas, the importance of fungal taxonomy, and the challenge of demonstrating the relevance of mycorrhizal fungal diversity to forest resilience and restoration should be a main focus of this symposium. However, contributions on saprobic and plant pathogenic fungi are also of interest.

Scientific Session 8:
Applying ecological knowledge for sustainable management of tropical forest
Session Organizer: Marielos Pena Claros & Sven Günter
Goal of the Symposium:
It is widely recognized that the conservation of tropical forests will depend largely on the fate of tropical forests managed for timber and other products, since the amount of forests in protected reserves is limited. Forests that are not managed sustainably will eventually lose their economic and ecological value and are likely to be converted to non-forest land uses. The prerequisite for sustainable forest management is a good working knowledge of forest ecosystems and the species that are being managed. Unfortunately, there is much that is unknown about tropical forest ecosystems, and very often, what is known is poorly communicated to forest managers. The objective of this symposium is to summarize the extent of our knowledge regarding the ecological basis for forest management and stimulate a discussion about key ecological information still needed and how it could be most effectively passed on and used by forest managers. We would like to focus on different forest types of the tropical region and on timber as one of the products being provided by forests.

Scientific Session 9:
Nutrient manipulation experiments in tropical forests
Session Organizers: Jürgen Homeier & Christoph Leuschner
Goal of the Symposium:
Elevated nitrogen inputs are one of the most influential factors that will act on tropical rainforests in the 21st century. Rapid population growth and economic development in many tropical countries are expected to double N fertiliser use in the rainforest region by 2020. Furthermore, fossil fuel consumption and biomass burning will see its largest increase in tropical countries resulting in a dramatic rise of N emissions into the atmosphere in the coming decades. In the temperate zone, the consequences of elevated N inputs into forest ecosystems have been investigated by a number of coordinated studies during the past 15 years. Although tropical forests most likely will respond to these changes as well, the size and even the direction of the net response are unclear. Previous studies suggested that increased N deposition may enhance long-term C-sequestration in the soils of tropical wet forests, but deposition could also increase acidification and subsequently decrease forest growth where forests are not N-limited. In addition, the interaction of N input and P availability is unclear. Well-designed nutrient addition experiments could substantially contribute to our knowledge about the probable future changes in species composition and diversity, and in C sequestration as the result of the expected future increase of N deposition to tropical ecosystems

Scientific Session 10:
Session 10: Who saves the rainforests? (with representatives from NGOs)
Session Organizer: Klaus Riede
Goal of the Symposium:
Scientists and representatives from NGOs evaluate past initiatives and discuss future strategies to save the rainforests.
"Save the rainforest" has become a guiding principle for modern citizens from industrialised nations, but also for indigenous people, NGOs and increasing numbers of citizens from tropical countries. Most national and international governmental organisations basically agree on the importance of tropical forests for ecosystem services, and the high value of hitherto unstudied biodiversity. Inspite of this general consensus, tropical forest loss continues at unprecedented rates, revealing international conservation goals as mere lip services. Numerous projects and campaigns of NGOs made a huge contribution to raise public awareness, gained some spectacular victories, but certainly could not stop the main drivers of rainforest loss. Likewise, scientists continue to stress the importance and even economic value of tropical biodiversity, but hitherto did not succeed to establish mechanisms for efficient protection or sustainable use of rainforests. This symposium investigates lessons learnt and explores future possibilities of improved cooperation between scientists, NGOs and other stakeholders.

Scientific Session 11:
Modified forest ecosystems: linkages between dispersal, recruitment, and carbon storage can improve conservation
Session Organizer: Nina Farwig & Norbert Cordeiro
Goal of the Symposium:
Forest destruction and conversion have resulted in an overall loss of global biodiversity, and recent esti-mates of mammals and birds, the best studied taxonomic groups, reveal a severe extinction crisis. Organ-isms, such as plants and animals, may depend on each other in mutualistic relationships such as seed dis-persal and pollination, and loss of one partner can have reproductive repercussions on the other. As a re-sult of these predictions on biotic extinctions, forest integrity is becoming an important global conservation issue. Current conservation paradigms need to evolve by focusing on different forest management types such as tree plantations and secondary forests to buffer potential extinctions of mutualistic partners. These forest types are often used to compensate for the destruction and conversion of natural forests in the tropics, but often without regard to preserving the integrity of remaining primary forest. The growing interest in the conservation value of human-shaped landscapes shapes the impetus to present landmark studies on the potential of modified forest ecosystems for biodiversity conservation. The range and inter-disciplinary nature of presentations centred around the themes of mutualisms, forest integrity and conservation from all over the tropics will help stake-holders determine and shape future research directions.

Scientific Session 12:
Tropical Research Station La Gamba (Costa Rica) - studying effects of global change on a regional scale
Session Organizers: Anton Weber & Veronika Mayer
Goal of the Symposium:
Tropical countrysides are increasingly dominated by anthropogenically modified habitats. Related habitat loss and land-use intensification are recognized as main drivers for the decline of tropical biodiversity and are expected to have significant scale-dependent effects on ecological services and ecosystem processes. Moreover, climate change is expected to markedly impact tropical ecosystem functions, such as net primary production and nutrient cycling/retention. This symposium aims to summarize consequences of anthropogenic activities for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem components with a geographical focus on the Golfo Dulce region on the Pacific slope of southern Costa Rica. Global change research in this region is facilitated by the Field Station La Gamba ("Tropenstation La Gamba").
The Field Station is located at the margin of the Esquinas rainforest (Piedras Blancas National Park) in the vicinity of the village La Gamba. It was founded in 1993 and serves as a base for field courses and research activities in a wide range of life and social sciences. The station is run by a private association but is closely connected to the University of Vienna.The Esquinas rainforest is one of the largest remaining stretches of pristine lowland rainforest at the Pacific coast of Central America. The forest stands out by its high mean annual precipitation (>5800 mm), high nutrient status (fast land lift and soil erosion) and striking levels of biodiversity (120-180 tree species >10 cm dbh per hectare).
The tight structural coupling between rainforest and a mosaic of different land-use systems around the village of La Gamba enables the study of the complex interactions between habitat types at different spatial and temporal scales and levels of organisation (biodiversity, ecosystem processes, and biotic interactions). Within the frame of the planned symposium some examples are given of scientific approaches, highlighting that the station is ideally suited to study impacts of global change on the complex interactions between rainforests and the adjacent cultural landscape.

Scientific Session 13:
Interactions in a changing world: the Brazilian Atlantic Forest - a case study direct and indirect human impacts on a threatened ecosystem
Session Organizers: Thomas Püttker & Daniel Piechowski
Goal of the Symposium:
The coastal Atlantic Forest is one of the world's most threatened ecosystems. Due to centuries of extensive land-use and forest logging only about 7% of the original forest area is left. Currently, main threats for the remaining ecosystem are habitat loss and fragmentation (i.e. by extending sugarcane plantations), hunting, and structural changes of the forest vegetation due to use of forest resources by the local population. Because of the wide geographical extension of the Atlantic Forest biome, conservationists are facing a broad range of tasks depending on regional differences of land-use. The goal of this symposium is to present current direct and indirect impacts of human activities on different organism groups in the Atlantic Forest and to show possible solutions for special cases of human-nature interference. We are aiming to give an insight in the local conservation problems by means of examples from different groups of organisms as well as different regions of the Atlantic Forest. These current findings might be of a more general interest, since the conservational problems the Atlantic Forest is facing are problems other regions are facing too.

Scientific Session 14:
Human ecological dimensions in sustainable utilization and conservation of tropical rainforests
Session Organizers: Perdita Pohle & Heiko Faust
Goal of the Symposium:
Loss of biodiversity and land degradation are usually labelled as environmental problems, but they are not, they are problems created by the culture-specific relationship between people or societies and their natural environment (Messerli, 1994:144). In current research programmes with the objective of preserving biodi-versity, ecosystems and habitats in the tropical forest margins, it is essential not only to consider the natural ecosystem but to include human dimensions. In other words, the centre of attention for such research must be human actions: the interplay of acting individuals and social groups under specific social conditions. The agricultural frontier zones are usually areas of heterogenic ethnic, socio-cultural and socio-economic structures. Here, profound knowledge of ethnic-specific human ecological parameters is crucial for the sustainable utilization and conservation of tropical forests. In order to satisfy the objectives of environmental protection on the one hand and the utilization claims of the local population on the other hand, detailed analysis of the following aspects is needed:
1. ethnospecific knowledge (traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge), perception and evaluation of tropical rainforest ecosystems
2. identification of sustainable land use options, especially regarding the use of non- timber forest products (NTFPs), local agrobiodiversity and forest management practices (agro- and farm for-estry);
3. ethnospecific life-support strategies of small-scale farming households and strategies of biodiversity management; 4. determination of the political and administrative use agreements including land tenure systems.
The proposed symposium will stress on these topics inviting researchers of different disciplines, e.g. for-estry, cultural and political ecology, ethnobotany, geography.

Scientific Session 15:
Learning from the past: environmental history and biodiversity development
Session Organizers: Herrmann Behling & Simone Haberle
Goal of the Symposium:
We often ignore the fact that ecosystems have a history in which environmental changes, including climate change and anthropogenic impacts, have played a significant role. To understand modern ecosystems, background information about their development is important. Palaeoecological studies, including archaeobotanical and dendroecological studies, provide the basis to understand the modern ecosystems. Further, to assess the stability and/or dynamic of modern ecosystems, especially in view of current and future global change, long term records of past environmental changes are needed. This symposium will address the following questions: How stable or dynamic are ecosystems in space and time? How 'virgin' are ecosystems? How have past human activities influenced the shape of current communities? How resilient are ecosystems towards environmental changes? What are the thresholds? How far biodiversity is affected by environmental changes and human impact? What can we learn from the past for management and conservation strategies?

Scientific Session 16:
Cascading effects of hunting in tropical forests
Session Organizer: Patrick Jansen
Goal of the Symposium:
Tropical forests are rapidly loosing large bird and mammal species due to over-hunting and/or habitat fragmentation. Many of the game species affected interact with plants, as pollinators, seed dispersers, seed predators, seedling herbivores and/or ecosystem engineers. This symposium explores the ecosystem functions of wildlife and ecosystem consequences of wildlife loss. How serious is the loss of wildlife? Do other organisms tend to take over functions when large animals become less abundant or entirely disappear? Are plant species differentially affected? Will tropical forests radically change when larger wildlife disappears? What can we learn from historical extinctions of large mammals and birds? This symposium is a follow-up of the hunting impacts symposium at the 2005 annual meeting in Uberlandia, Brazil, published in the May 2007 issue of Biotropica.

Scientific Session 17:
Biofuels, biodiversity and people
Session Organizers: Lucy Rist & Lian Pin Koh
Goal of the Symposium:
Biofuels have significant potential for environmental and development benefit. Rapid expansions of biofuel crops could, however, result in detrimental impacts on the environment, food security, and rural livelihoods. For example, while oil palm agriculture (Elaeis guineensis) has created new opportunities for poverty alleviation and contributed substantially to economic development in Southeast Asia over the last few decades, this crop has also become a major driver of tropical deforestation in the region. In this symposium, we will discuss the ecological and social impacts of biofuel expansion in Asia, Africa and South America, covering a variety of biofuel feedstocks (e.g., oil palm, sugarcane, and jatropha). We will highlight the need for quantitative and evidence-based approaches to shape appropriate land use, energy and climate change policies for sustainable biofuel production.

Scientific Session 18:
Ecosystem engineers in a changing world
Session Organizers: Rainer Wirth & Inara R. Leal
Goal of the Symposium:
Ecosystem engineers are organisms that directly or indirectly modulate the availability of resources to other species via biophysical processes. Such indirect species-interactions are ubiquitous and have the potential to drastically alter the environmental configuration. In doing so ecosystem engineers modify, maintain and/or create habitats by changing resource flows, influencing vegetation structure/composition, creating landscape mosaics, and thus affecting the spatial arrangement of current and future organismal diversity. In anthropogenically modified landscapes, where a multitude of disturbances can alter trophic and non-trophic interactions in different synergistic or antagonistic ways, the concept of ecosystem engineering is especially promising. It can yield new insights into the role played by species for ecosystem functioning, advance the understanding of resilience or vulnerability of ecosystems, help to identify keystone species and ultimately improve management and conservation efforts. This symposium, thus, aims to collect and share current knowledge on two major complexes: (1) Which organisms play engineering roles and how do they influence the structure/composition of communities? (2) Are ecosystem engineers responding positively or negatively to human impacts/anthropogenic landscape alterations and whether/how does this feed back to the services which they provide for the ecosystem?

Scientific Session 19:
Land-use change at local and landscape scales: biodiversity, ecosystems and livelihoods in the tropics
Session Organizers: Yann Clough & Jana Juhrbandt
Goal of the Symposium:
This symposium addresses land-use change, agricultural intensification and their effects on ecological processes and livelihoods. Land-use change is the main driver of global change. Landscapes in tropical regions are becoming increasingly dominated by anthropogenic habitats, as cropland frontiers advance into natural and near-natural habitats. The increasing demand for food, fibre and biofuels prompts not only the expansion of agricultural land but also the intensification of its use. These changes operate at the local level, i.e. the intensification of a single field or farm, but also at the landscape level, where adjacent lands occupied by near natural habitats or other diverse land-use forms are decreasing. Changes at both scales interact in affecting biodiversity and ecosystem functions in ways still poorly investigated, especially in the tropics. The real challenge however is to identify economic drivers and ecological feedbacks to better un-derstand the human-nature interface in tropical regions. This symposium will emphasize the importance of multi-scale, interdisciplinary research in understanding land-use change processes, and will provide an opportunity for information exchange, discussion, inspiration and synthesis.

Scientific Session 20:
Biodiversity theories
Session Organizers: Erwin Beck & Manfred Niekisch
Goal of the Symposium:
There are a number of theories or hypotheses which endeavour to explain the distribution and patterns of terrestrial biodiversity at different scales. Others deal with the occurrence of biodiversity hotspots under phylogenetic, historical and survival aspects. Most of these considerations address biodiversity in relation to (tropical) ecosystems. In addition to a discussion of the applicability and scientific significance of the various theories and rules, methods of biodiversity quantification shall be considered in the symposium.

Scientific Session 22:
Climate effects on regeneration dynamics - what can they tell us about climate change?
Session Organizers: Liza Comita & Bettina Engelbrecht
Goal of the Symposium:
Projections of global climate change predict pronounced increases in temperature and shifts in rainfall patterns for much of the tropics, with large areas exhibiting climates without current equivalents. Changes in climatic factors have already been observed in parts of the tropics over the last decades and are projected to continue and intensify due to forest fragmentation, as well as global climate change. As a consequence of climate change, marked changes in vegetation patterns are expected for the tropics, with some scenarios predicting a complete decline of tropical forests. However, current vegetation-climate models, particularly for tropical regions, suffer from a lack of ecological data and mechanistic understanding of the factors shaping current population dynamics and species distributions.
Seedling performance is affected by climatic factors, namely moisture, temperature and light, and by their interactions with additional abiotic and biotic factors, such as herbivores, fire and land-use. Effects of climatic factors on seedlings may have pervasive consequences at the community level, and ultimately drive vegetation shifts with climate change.
This symposium aims to bring together work examining effects of climatic factors on tropical tree seedling regeneration in tropical systems at the ecophysiological, population and community level. We aim to cover a range of tropical systems, as well as work from various continents. We will explore how climatic factors presently affect tropical seedlings, and the implications for seedling regeneration, population dynamics, community structure and distribution patterns under conditions of global climate change.

Scientific Session 23:
Struggle in the Tropics - responses to stress in tropical environments
Session Organizers: Pia Parolin & Michael Lakatos
Goal of the Symposium:
150 years after the publication of 'On the Origin of Species' by Charles Darwin, the discussion on the role of struggle for life and on responses of organisms to stress is still up to date. Thus, symposium aims at addressing current issues of concern in the field of tropical ecology in a changing environment. It includes a broad overview from non-vascular to vascular plants, from physiological ecology to ecosystem ecology and from natural to disturbed habitats. The focus lies on responses of tropical plants to environmental stresses of biotic or abiotic origin, e.g. competition, parasitism, or the struggle for light in gaps or closed forests, responses to drought or flooding, and many more.
The presented papers and posters may be thereafter published in a special issue of the new on-line open access botanical journal AoB PLANTS that is promoted by the Annals of Botany Company (AoB) and published by Oxford University Press. Since AoB is a renowned and highly professional journal, we expect that its new open access strategy will come along with extensive promotion and advertisement. The worlwide publicity campaign accompanied by open access will attract interest to this publication - advantages which will balance the disadvantages of lacking an impact factor yet!

Scientific Session 25:
Adaptation of agro forestry to climate change: ecological and socioeconomic aspects
Session Organizers: Luitgard Schwendenmann & Stefan Schwarze
Goal of the Symposium:
Predicted changes in temperature and precipitation will affect many ecosystems and may have a severe impact on agriculture in many tropical regions. Recent literature suggests that agroforestry systems, if properly designed, may have a higher ecological resilience to extreme climate events than annual cropping systems (Verchot et al. 2007, Lin et al. 2008). There is, however, little known of the influence of different dimensions of climate change (for example temperature and water availability) on specific agroforestry systems. Due to their higher ecological resilience, agroforestry systems may play an important role in the adaptation strategies of smallholders to climate change (Verchot et al. 2007). This role of agroforestry sys-tems depends on the specific ecological resilience, but also on the economic and institutional framework. These characteristics require site specific research, which is still scarce. To improve the knowledge, this symposium aims to bring together researcher from natural and social sciences and their experiences from different agroforestry systems found in tropical countries. The main focus of the symposium will be on 1) understanding the potential of agroforestry to contribute to adaptation to climate change, 2) presenting case studies highlighting the role of agroforestry in reducing the vulnerability to climate change for smallholder farmers in the tropics and subtropics.

Scientific Session 26:
The Advantages of Experimental Studies in Tropical Ecosystem Research
Session Organizers: Emma Sayer & Francis Brearley
Goal of the Symposium:
One of the greatest challenges in Ecology is to predict the response of ecosystems to disturbance. Any given ecosystem process involves a highly complex web of interactions between many different organisms and their environment and these must be identified before the effects of perturbations can be studied in detail. Furthermore, any given disturbance to the ecosystem has the potential to affect each component of the process in different ways and many effects may not be immediately apparent. Large-scale field experiments have become a powerful tool in the study of environmental change at the ecosystem level because different components of the ecosystem can be manipulated in a more or less controlled manner. Ecosystem experiments can deliver a wealth of information on basic ecosystem functioning as well as on the response of biotic and abiotic components to disturbance and the mechanisms behind observed changes. Concern about the effects of global change such as elevated CO2 levels and global warming have lead to an increased importance of experiments as a tool to study the effects of perturbations at the ecosystem level. This symposium aims to illustrate the advantages of using experimental studies in tropical ecosystem science and to highlight the value of experimental data in improving predictions of environmental change.The symposium will also provide a broad overview of current techniques regarding sampling design and analytical methods in ecosystem experiments.

Scientific Session 28:
DNA Barcodes: applications to forest inventories and community phylogenies in tropical ecosystems
Session Organizers: W. John Kress & David L. Erickson
Goal of the Symposium:
DNA barcodes are a potentially revolutionary tool for systematists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and conservationists who need to determine with an accurate, reliable, and rapid method the species name of an unidentified whole organism or tissue sample in order to further studies of biodiversity and ecosystem processes. The utility of DNA barcodes for such purposes in the identification of animals has now been demonstrated; work on determining the most feasible gene regions to employ as a DNA barcode for plants is nearly complete. As an identification tool for ecologists investigating ecosystem dynamics and evolutionary interactions barcodes can be efficiently applied to studies of root diversity and distribution as well as plant-herbivore interactions. As an aid to investigations of character evolution and functional trait analyses in tropical forests DNA barcodes may also be used as molecular markers to generate hypotheses of phylogenetic relationships among the plant and animal species in communities. The goal of this symposium is to present the latest results on the application of DNA barcodes to tropical ecosystems to help further our understanding of the evolutionary and ecological processes that have shaped species assembly and interactions in these forests.

Scientific Session 34:
Impacts of climatic change in the tropics today and tomorrow
Session Organizers: William F. Laurance & Ana Carnaval
Goal of the Symposium:
Tropical forests are clearly vulnerable to future climatic change, but much uncertainty exists about the nature and magnitude of the potential impacts. There is considerably uncertainty, for example, about the expected magnitude of increase in global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels in coming decades. Projections of future climates also vary substantially, particularly for parameters such as regional precipitation, which strongly influences the persistence of tropical forests and their vulnerability to fire.
Another source of ambiguity is the effects of global-change phenomena on tropical ecosystem functioning. A heated debate is raging, for instance, between those who believe tropical forests are functioning as a net carbon sink (because forest productivity is increasing in response to rising CO2 levels) versus those who assert that forests are becoming carbon sources (because higher temperatures are increasing plant respiration rates, and thereby slowing plant growth). ne of the most crucial sources of uncertainty concerns the effects of rising temperatures on tropical biota. Many tropical species are assumed to be thermal specialists because they experience only modest variation in temperature during the course of the year. This should promote strong elevational stratification of biota, with species becoming specialized for a particular thermal regime. Such specialization likely accounts for the large number of restricted-endemic species in cool montane areas of the tropics, which have disjunct distributions isolated from other montane areas by expanses of warm, inhospitable habitat. As global temperatures continue to rise in coming decades, the many high-elevation specialists in the tropics could be among the most imperilled species on earth. Rising temperatures could also alter many other features of montane areas, such the height of the cloud base, moisture inputs from cloud-stripping, and the diversity and virulence of pathogens.
Lowland species may also be vulnerable to rising temperatures, although, again, a great deal remains uncertain. Many lowland species, particularly ectotherms such as reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates, appear to have narrow thermal optima and a limited capacity to acclimate to higher temperatures. Many lowland species have high rates of evaporative water loss, for which rising temperatures could increase desiccation stress. In addition, within vast lowland areas such as the Amazon and Congo Basin, lowland species lack nearby upland forests into which they could migrate in response to rising temperatures, and their potential dispersal avenues into higher elevations are also being limited by rapid habitat loss and fragmentation.

Scientific Session 35:
Free Topics - Bats
Session Organizers: Elisabeth Kalko


Scientific Session 36:
Free Topics - Phylogenetic / Phylogeography
Session Organizers: C.W. Dick & Birgit Ziegenhagen


Scientific Session 37:
Free Topics - Forest
Session Organizers: Robert Gradstein & Patrick Jansen


Scientific Session 38:
Free Topics - Vertebrates
Session Organizers: Eckhard Heymann


Scientific Session 39:
Free Topics - Ants
Session Organizers: Eduard Linsenmair & Brigitte Fiala


Scientific Session 40:
Free Topics - Plant-Insect Interactions
Session Organizers: Pierre-Michel Forget & Hans ter Steege


Scientific Session 41:
Free Topics
Session Organizers: Pierre-Michel Forget & Hans ter Steege