Conservation biologists meet in Brazil to discuss ecological future
Annual Meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology
July 24, 2005
Last week nearly 2,000 of the world's leading environmental scientists of various disciplines met in Brasilia to present papers at the 19th Annual Meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology. The conference featured more than 750 oral presentations and 965 scientific abstracts on hundreds of topics relating to conservation biology.
Brazil is an appropriate venue for such a conference. The nation houses more biodiversity than any other country on the planet thanks to the Amazon rainforest, yet its biological richenss is increasingly threatened by development activities especially habitat clearing for agriculture. Recent figures released by the Brazilian government indicate that 10,088 square miles (26,000 square kilometers) of rain forest were destroyed in the 12 months ending in August 2004 and that more than 200,000 square miles (520,000 square kilometers) of forest have been leveled since the late 1970s.
Here are some abstracts of papers presented at the conference. This is by no means an exhaustive list; it mostly consists of rainforest-related papers that have been roughly grouped by subject. If you are a scientist who participated in the conference and I have neglected to list your paper, I apologize in advance.
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