Encyclopedia of Life Blog

The Biodiversity Synthesis Center has been very active in the past three months: we have hosted three synthesis meetings, had a booth at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Conference in San Antonio, TX, and begun construction on our new conference center. We have also added two new employees to our team (as mentioned in a previous post) and are interviewing more post-docs.

Synthesis Meetings
Two of our meetings were the product of an exciting collaboration with a team at Adobe Systems in San Fransisco. The first was a small meeting between Adobe staff and BioSynC staff at the Field Museum to plan a more detailed meeting. The second one: “Visualizing the Tree of Life II: Developing a Graphic Interface for the EOL” (December 3) was held at Adobe Corporation headquarters. Hosted by BioSynC Director Mark Westneat, Assistant Director Rick Ree and Gever Tulley (Adobe), the meeting focused on developing a visualization interface for the “Tree of Life” which may serve as a gateway to the EOL. Mark and Rick were joined by several of the premier thinkers in phylogeny visualization: David Maddison (Arizona), Mike Sanderson (Arizona), Bill Piel (Yale), and David Patterson (EOL at MBL). Adobe is lending some great minds to the effort, including Gever Tulley, Marcos Weskamp, Simon Smith, and Mike Sundermeyer.
Our third meeting “Planning BryoZone: A Unified Bryozoan Reference on the Web” (December 12-15) was the first of many organism-focused synthesis meetings, organized by Scott Lidgard. Taxonomic synthesis meetings bring together some of the world’s experts on a particular taxonomic group to set the agenda for future research in the field and organize the group for incorporation into the EOL. This meeting focused on the Bryozoa, a cosmopolitan group of aquatic invertebrates that are found in all water depths and salinities, including freshwater. Bryozoans are an important group of microscopic animals that band together to create large skeletonized colonies, similar to tiny coral animals forming coral heads. The synthesis meeting brought together 10 experts from all over the world including Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Poland, Colombia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to plan future research for the group. The meeting goals included producing a large PBI grant proposal for the National Science Foundation, designing and testing internet data that will become part of the EOL, and organizing the large but disparate existing data on these animals.
All three meetings were very successful, Adobe continues to pursue the creation of a tree visualization, and will debut a tree browser at the upcoming TED conference (end February 2008), while the Bryozoan scientists submitted their proposal and also are preparing data on Bryozoans to enter into the EOL.

Presentations and Outreach
As well as hosting meetings, BioSynC has been busy spreading the word about the EOL. Recent efforts include a presentation by Mark Westneat, Jim Edwards, and David Patterson on the EOL and BioSynC at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (Duke University), a variety of presentations to the public and to group meetings such as the Bivalve and Liverwort ATOL groups. A BioSynC team (Mark Westneat, Audrey Aronowsky, and Alta Buden) traveled to San Antonio,TX for the annual SICB conference, where they hosted a booth representing the BioSynC and the EOL.

Building The Center
Construction of the new Synthesis Center on the ground floor officially began December 21, 2007. Plans for the 3500 sq ft space in Hall C include two 150 sq ft offices for administrative staff, three shared 150 sq ft offices for postdoctoral and academic staff, an office cubicle area for students and interns, a conference room (300 sq ft), a seminar room (600 sq ft), a reception and discussion area complete with coffee and refreshment bar as well as a Tech Center with EOL consoles. The conference and seminar rooms will be fully AV and internet equipped. Six weeks into construction things are looking good, and we look forward to hosting biodiversity groups in our new space as soon as possible.