The 8th Invertebrate Biodiversity & Conservation Conference, Brisbane,  2007 — “Pacific Priorities”

Organisers
Peter Davie, Robert Raven, Christine Lambkin, Queensland Museum

Session Chairman
Peter Davie (Marine Megadiversity session)
Tom Cribb (University of Queensland)/Rob Adlard (QM), (Parasitology session)
Geoff Monteith, QM / Herve Jourdan (New Caledonia session)
John Stanisic (Survival in Suburbia session)
Alan York (Fire session)
Bob Mesibov (Invasive  Species session)
Stephen Cameron (Are Mitochondria/Cloroplasts Enough? session)
Barbara Baehr (Terrestrial Biodiversity - Spiders as Bioindicators session)

Scientific Committee
Robert Adlard , QM
Peter Castro, California State Polytechnic University
Rosie Gillespie, University of California Berkeley
Dennis Gordon, National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, New Zealand
Peter K.L. Ng, NUS
John Stanisic, QM
Carden Wallace, QM
Christine Lambkin, QM

Conference Symposia

MARINE MEGADIVERSITY –

While some marine habitats have always been seen as species-rich, recent studies have begun to recognise previously unguessed levels of diversity and small scale endemism. For example, exceptional numbers of undescribed mollusc species have been uncovered from the reefs of New Caledonia and other Pacific sites; temperate shelf communities off southeastern Australia have given new perspectives on the diversity of deepwater crustaceans; and local patches of extreme richness have been discovered throughout the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. With anthropogenic pressures mounting on the marine environment, there is an increasingly urgent need to understand the mechanisms influencing biodiversity, and to develop conservation strategies, such as marine protected areas. Threatening processes such as global warming are threatening to wipe out corals through major recurring bleaching events — and with them the vast diversity of animals dependent on healthy coral systems. The idea of focussing on high diversity areas, “Biodiversity Hotspots”, has become common-place in conservation planning — is this concept and its underlying assumptions the most appropriate? While it is most commonly applied to the tropics can it equally apply to temperate assemblages? Are there critical differences between the Indian and Pacific Ocean systems? 

PARASITE DIVERSITY – and

Parasites are an integral and natural part of every ecosystem. Even the most conservative estimates place parasite diversity at 50% of all life, but of course this only requires a single parasite species to be specific to a single host species. Most parasite research has focussed on those species that cause mortality and morbidity in humans, and in our agricultural and companion animals and plants.  Parasite biodiversity research aimed at understanding broad systems and processes is less common, and has attracted less research funding, although it is now taking on an emerging role in informing biosecurity risk.  Without biodiversity studies to characterise parasite fauna within a specific locality/country it becomes impossible to identify incursions of exotic species.  Equally, assessing risks of introduction of exotic pathogens is made more difficult without fundamental knowledge on either host specificity or pathogenicity. This meeting will provide an opportunity to review the status of parasite biodiversity research in the tropical Indo-Pacific region, with emphasis on the mechanisms of diversity discovery, and its relevance in ecosystem ecology, commerce and human health. 

INVASIVE SPECIES –  

“We are living in a period of the world’s history when the mingling of thousands of kinds of organisms from different parts of the world is setting up terrific dislocations in nature…” Charles Elton (1958)

In today’s climate of globalisation, the volume and speed of people and commodities moving around the world has greatly accelerated the translocation of organisms. Many fail to establish, others survive but are relatively innocuous — but some become highly invasive with dramatic environmental and economic impacts. Invasive species can have direct negative effects on native biodiversity but more complex interactions can result in profound changes to ecosystems through the disruption of nutrient recycling, fire regimes, plant dispersal syndromes and succession and the removal of keystone species. Australia already has an impressive list of exotic invaders with more to come. What are the impacts of invasive species our biodiversity. Which are the most likely new invaders? How can we improve biosecurity to prevent new introductions and how do we identify new incursions more rapidly? How do we control or eradicate invasives, or at least mitigate their impacts? 

NEW CALEDONIA – and

Situated in the south-west Pacific about 1300 km from Australia, New Caledonia is one of the smallest biodiversity hotspots in the world. Although not megadiverse, New Caledonia has a distinctive flora and fauna displaying exceptionally high levels of endemism. New Caledonia has five endemic plant families, including what is regarded as the most primitive extant flowering plant, Amborella trichopoda (Amborellaceae). New Caledonia is home to two thirds of world’s species of primitive pines belonging to the genus Araucaria, all of which are endemic. Similarly, the New Caledonian invertebrate fauna is highly endemic with many notable primitive Gondawnan taxa. The invertebrates also show high levels of regional endemicity with many low vagility taxa restricted to higher altitudes along the central mountain massif. A symposium on the invertebrates on New Caledonia is timely given the wealth of inventory and systematic work conducted on the fauna in recent years and given the mounting threats to the terrestrial fauna posed by mining, clearing, altered fire regimes and the invasive Little fire ant, Wasmannia auropunctata. 

SURVIVAL IN SUBURBIA –

Is urban biodiversity an oxymoron? Maybe for vertebrates but certainly not for invertebrates. The role of these tiny animals in maintaining the health of the remaining ‘green spots’ within the urban footprint needs closer examination. A recently completed survey of terrestrial invertebrates within the city of Brisbane bushland has found an extraordinary diversity of insects, spiders and snails. However, beyond their immediate presence also lies the possibility of using these creatures as monitors of a healthy environment. This session focuses on the survival of invertebrates in the urban environment. 

FIRE –

Next to mechanical land clearing, fire poses the most significant threat to invertebrate biodiversity worldwide. Fire is extensively used as a `land management’ tool in order to clear forests, reduce fuel loads and in some instances to produce new growth (‘green pick’) for stock. Often fire is used with regard only for its effects on vertebrates, human and non-human. It would seem however that perennial burning of the landscape, as opposed to random wildfires, must gradually alter the vegetation coverage and hence invertebrate biodiversity. This session will examine fire in the environment and its effects on invertebrate biodiversity. 

INVERTEBRATE SALVAGE –

Biodiversity salvage is the collection, preservation, and documentation of species, populations, and genetic samples that are likely to disappear. Salvage programs are needed in areas where native-range biodiversity is disappearing fastest, with highest priority going to places which are: 1) going to be converted from natural habitat in the immediate future; 2) farthest from better-protected natural areas, and 3) in biodiversity data gaps. It can be compared to archaeological salvage. When a new road or building is planned for a site in a long-settled area, archaeologists are employed to salvage items and information of historical value from the site. The aim is not to stop the development, but simply to recover some of our historical heritage before it is destroyed. The aim of biodiversity salvage is not to stop development, but to recover some of Earth's natural heritage before it is destroyed.
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ARE MITOCHONDRIA/CLOROPLASTS ENOUGH? –

Molecular methodologies have revolutionised many aspects of systematics and biodiversity sciences and the most widely molecular markers are the organelle genomes – mitochondria for animals and chloroplasts for plants.  The proposed advantages of using organelle markers include high copy number, neutral evolutionary patterns, high rates of substitution suitable for species and population level studies and predictable gender specific genealogies.  But how consistent are these features and how much do variations from these predictable patterns effect the interpretation of studies using these data sources?  Recent proposals to shift molecular methodologies to the centre of taxonomic research (DNA barcoding, molecular species definition, molecular diagnostics etc) have made the examination of these issues critical to the success of these endeavours.  This symposium will examine novel uses of organelle genome data in systematics, its vulnerability to non-standard patterns of evolution or genome structure and recent advances in the empirical use of these data sources.

TERRESTRIAL BIODIVERSITY – SPIDERS AS BIOINDICATORS –

Most of the conclusions about biodiversity and their hotspots rely on vertebrates which are only a few % of the world’s species. Vertebrates have usually wide geographic distributions which makes them uninformative for smaller habitats.
Species in megadiverse groups, such as insects or spiders, most of them only few mm in size, often have much smaller geographic ranges than most vertebrates.
As a megadiverse, microdistributed group, spiders are excellent candidates for biodiversity and conservation purposes, as bioindicators for habitat evaluation, for historical biogeography studies or studies on evolution of communities.
Australia, with its extremely unique spider fauna, offers an excellent example for exceptionally high biodiversity. 81 of the 108 currently recognized spider families live in Australia and about 3.300 species have been described so far, but more than 6.000 Australian species await description. (Dr. Robert Raven, pers. com., Dr. Norman Platnick, the World Spider Catalog, Version 8, at: (http://research.amnh.org/entomology/spiders/catalog).
The high level of “short range endemics” of most of the low vagility spider taxa makes them most valuable as bioindicators or for studying evolution of communities on remote Pacific Islands.
Alpha taxonomy, describing the species and higher taxa, is the first step to recognize and assign “Bioindicator Species” to compare spider communities of different habitats and make them extremely valuable for biodiversity, and for conservation issues.

SYSTEMATICS OF AUSTRALIAN INVERTEBRATES: THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY - and

The enterprise of describing and understanding our invertebrate fauna is a global one.  Australian invertebrate lineages are often critical to a complete systematic and biogeographic understanding of the groups to which they belong.  Because of this, systematists studying the Australian fauna are placing their results in a global context more often.  This has a number of benefits, including the ability to test biogeographic scenarios for Australian faunal elements proposed last century.  At another level, Australian systematists and taxa are increasingly becoming involved in global initiatives designed to understand invertebrate diversity and relationships.  Many of these programs are funded through the National Science Foundation of the USA, such as Partnerships Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET), Planetary Biodiversity Inventory (PBI), and Assembling the Tree of Life (ATOL).  These programs make a considerable direct and indirect investment in the effort to understand our invertebrate diversity, and provide a variety of benefits to our taxonomic workforce.  As such, they are extremely important to the overall effort.  This symposium brings together speakers involved in a number of these global initiatives to discuss the research outcomes, opportunities and costs of involvement in these international scientific collaborations.