For the year 2009-2010, EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy) proposes a list of 31 trainings-on-the-job in European EDIT and non-EDIT institutions, covering various areas in taxonomy. EDIT provides a limited number of short-term traineeships for students and early career researchers working or studying in the field of taxonomy at an EDIT institution or at a European university/research institute.

The 16th meeting of the GBIF Governing Board (GB16) takes place in Copenhagen, Denmark from 3-9 October 2009.

The GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) is an open source software platform developed by the GBIF Secretariat to facilitate efficient biodiversity data publishing to the Internet by all Participants in the GBIF network. Read more...

Read the latest DanBIF newsletter online here (in Danish).

GEO BON stands for the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network. By facilitating and linking efforts of countries, international organizations, and individuals, GEO BON will contribute to the collection, management, sharing, and analysis of data on the status and trends of the world's biodiversity.

The workshop was a great succes. See group photo of participants and trainers here and list of georeferencing links from the workshop here. See workshop schedule and teaching resources here.

24th annual meeting of SPNHC. For the second time in history the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections is coming to Europe. Bridging Continents presents new, large-scaled infrastructure projects in natural history collections, the state-of-art in collection care and best practice, the latest on digitization of collections and much more.

The extended deadline for the call for oral/poster contributions is 13 February 2009. The ECCB2009 will bring together the full range of conservation professionals not only to report on latest results, but also to explore the role of conservation science in policy formation and effective practice. The Congress theme, “conservation biology and beyond: from science to practice” reflects the fact that delivering effective conservation requires a range of actors. Conservation still suffers from these different actors being poorly coordinated and there is work to do to ensure a concerted effort. Conservation science needs to cover a broader range of disciplines than just biology to be relevant to practice and needs feedback from application on successes, problems faced and research needs.

Following up on the success of the First DIVERSITAS Open Science Conference " Integrating biodiversity science for human well-being" (2005), and in order to provide in-depth overviews of a broad range of topics in biodiversity research and initiate biodiversity research projects around the world, DIVERSITAS is pleased to announce its Second Open Science Conference: Biodiversity and society: Understanding connections, adapting to change.

The BIOLIEF conference will be held in Porto (Portugal), between the 27th and 30th October 2009. This conference will be devoted to the presentation of works concerning the biology, ecology and population dynamics of biological invasions. Those works relating biological invasions and changes on the functioning of ecosystem will be highly considered. The BIOLIEF conference will try to cover as many ecosystems and kingdoms as possible, giving each one of them equal importance in the definition of the final program. ABSTRACT DEADLINE MAY 31.

From August 10 to 14 the National Herbarium of the Netherlands and the National Museum of Natural History Naturalis are hosting the Systematics 2009 conference. This conference is not only the first meeting of the federation of European systematic societies BioSyst EU, but also the Seventh biennial meeting of the Systematics Association (United Kingdom) and the 11th annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik (GfBS, Germany).

The Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL; www.barcoding.si.edu) and the Instituto de Biologia of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) invite you to the Third International Barcode of Life Conference in Mexico City during the week of 7-12 November 2009. The main conference will be Tuesday-Thursday, 10-12 November at the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and there will be three days of pre-conference workshops and a post-conference public event at UNAM’s Science Museum. If you would like to be placed on the distribution list to receive future notices about the conference, please send an email message to inquiries.dnabarcodes2009@si.edu with "MAILING LIST" on the subject line. Please include your name and institutional affiliation in the body of your message.