From the organizers: “The SSE Council invites proposals for one sponsored symposium at the meeting that highlights new topics, provides new perspectives, or generates new syntheses. This symposia will consist of six half-hour talks.”
This was the last symposium:
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2022 Sponsored Symposium
Evolution in the tropics: 70 years since Dobzhansky (Oscar Vargas, Kathleen Kay)
Tropical diversity has long fascinated biologists, but most research to-date has addressed the ecological mechanisms maintaining diversity rather than evolutionary mechanisms generating diversity. The last review of Dobzhansky’s biotic selection hypothesis from an evolutionary perspective is now a decade old. This symposium seeks to synthesize the evolutionary history and importance of biotic and abiotic selective factors to diversification in the tropics, and to set the stage for advancing the field. Our symposium encompasses several sub-disciplines, including (but not restricted to) ecology, phylogenetics, and biogeography, and selected speakers have varied taxonomic foci, including a broad range of plants and animals.
Speakers:
Kathleen Kay (University of California Santa Cruz) Dobzhansky, Janzen, and speciation research in the tropics
Jonathan Rolland (University of British Columbia) Macroevolutionary approaches and the construction of the latitudinal diversity gradient
Oscar Vargas (University of California Santa Cruz) Testing hypotheses for neotropical plant diversification using comparative methods
Kimberly Sheldon (University of Tennessee) Janzen’s mountain passes and diversification in the tropics
Michael Harvey (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) Standing species richness shapes the tempo and mode of avian speciation across the Neotropics
Phyllis Coley (University of Utah) The role of plant-herbivore interactions in the maintenance and origin of tropical tree diversity
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If you think you have a topic for them, the organizers stress diversity but here’s what that means:
SSE Council seriously considers the diversity of participants as a criterion for symposium funding. Symposium organizers are expected to take into account gender, seniority, nationality, and other axes of diversity traditionally underrepresented in Society symposia, and to describe their efforts in the proposal. SSE will accept requests for additional funds for dependent care costs if this would allow a speaker to accept an invitation to speak in a sponsored symposium.
No, we didn’t notice anything about diverse viewpoints either. Must be a typo.