Congress "Tools for identifying biodiversity: progress and problems"

The correct identification of organisms is fundamental not only for the assessment and the conservation of biodiversity, but also in agriculture, forestry, the food and pharmaceutical industries, forensic biology, and in the broad field of formal and informal education at all levels. In the last decades, important advances have taken place in the way identification is carried out, from molecular and biochemical methods of rapid identification to the development of interactive identification systems based on morpho-anatomical data. This congress will provide an overview of recent advances in this field. It will stimulate integration of existing methods and systems, fostering communication amongst different research groups, and laying the foundations for integrated projects in the next decade.

The congress is organised in 4 main session devoted, respectively, to:

1) Interactive identification tools based on morpho-anatomical data (incl. image analysis),
2) Molecular and biochemical methods for the identification of organisms,
3) Identification and education,
4) Industrial and practical applications of the new identification tools: case-studies and markets.

The congress will end with a round-table presenting the most recent international opportunities for launching new projects and/or collaborating with existing ones. Invited speakers will be a representative of UNESCO, a representative of the EU Commission, and those responsible for some of the main European projects devoted to biodiversity.

In occasion of the UN International Year of Biodiversity, the congress is organised jointly by three large European projects dedicated to biodiversity and/or biological identification: KeyToNature, EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy), and STERNA (Semantic Web-based Thematic European Reference Network Application), in collaboration with the UNESCO Office of Venice.
Registration opens on March 10th, 2010.