The 11th ForBio Annual Meeting will take place at the Natural History Museum in Oslo using a hybrid format to enable participation in person and in silico. We will use our venues at the new Oslo Climate House and the historic Tøyen Manor to host a diverse and inspiring meeting.
All MSc and PhD students, postdocs, supervisors, faculty and the broad biosystematics community are invited to attend.
Registration is open now. To manage pandemic logistics we need to set the registration deadline at October 15th .
ForBio annual meetings bring scientists and students focused on biosystematics together to talk about their projects and current results, to share experiences on methods, and support networking within the scientific community. We encourage particularly early career researchers to use this meeting as an opportunity to present and discuss their own research in biosystematics and meet peers.
ForBio and UiB Dead Wood Meeting 2021 October 26–28, 2021, Virtual course
The intensive five-day course program is comprised by lectures, workshops, excursions, and an obligatory book exam. The target group is advanced master and PhD students. It is recommended that students have taken basic courses in entomology, mycology, and ecology. The aim of the course is to familiarize students with various aspects of the habitat, organism groups and ecological processes in dead wood. Dead wood experts will provide deeper coverage of their fields and research and will give examples of case studies and the workshop sessions. We will go through a broad range of topics, such as biodiversity in dead wood in boreal and temperate environments, biodiversity conservation and restoration, and of course all kinds of lignicolous organisms: fungi, insects, and more. Application deadline: October 10th 2021
UiB and ForBio course: Introduction to phylogenetic methods November 15-19, 2021, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Bergen
The is an introductory course that is aimed at students who will need to preform phylogenetic analyses in their work, but who have little or no experience with phylogenetic analyses. The course will cover all basic aspects of phylogenetic analyses with emphasis on use of DNA data. Students will learn how to prepare their data, explore its properties and how to analyze it using distance, parsimony, likelihood and Bayesian methods. In the last two days students will also get an introduction to molecular dating with focus on the use of BEAST and to comparative methods used to study the evolution of discrete and continuous traits. Application deadline: October 15th 2021
Doing science is only one aspect of being a successful researcher. Another aspect is the ability to communicate your science to a broad audience. This course aims to help you make and present your work in a 15-minute talk. Through lectures and constructive interactions with the other students, you will learn how to help the audience to follow your talk and to remember its message. Emphasized topics include: distilling your study into a concise theme that runs throughout the talk, powerful openers and closures to grab the audience's attention, contextualizing and justifying the study, simplifying the methods and figures, choosing just a few results to support the conclusion, and practicing in front of others to see what works and what needs to be changed.You will also learn how to edit parts of your talk so that they fit together well. Application deadline: October 15th 2021
Funding opportunities
ForBio Course grants
These course grants enable ForBio members to attend courses with a taxonomic focus that ForBio does not offer, but which are relevant for the current or future research interests and needs of the ForBio member. ForBio will fund members based in Norway (http://www.forbio.uio.no/membership/). The grants can cover the course fee, travel and accommodation, and a detailed budget should be included in the application (grants are up to 30 000 NOK). Please note that we have a limited budget for travel grants and we will prioritize grant applications that most closely meet the objectives of this program. The application procedure requires you to fill out a ForBio course grant application. At the end of the form you will need to attach (1) a letter of recommendation from your main supervisor, and (2) a personal CV.
ForBio & Transmitting Science ForBio organises some courses together with Transmitting Science (announced in the ForBio website). For these courses, ForBio will cover the registration fee for all accepted ForBio members. In addition, ForBio will cover travel and accommodation for ForBio members affiliated to Norwegian institutions. In order to benefit from this agreement, you need to indicate you are a ForBio member when registering through the transmitting Science website. A 30% confirmation fee may be required when registering; this will be reimbursed to ForBio members after the course.
ForBio members and associates also get a 20% discount on ALL Transmitting Science courses. You just need to indicateyour ForBio affiliation when registering.
Call for project proposals on species inventories
The Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre (NBIC) receives applications for funding of projects focusing on inventories of poorly known species groups. The call is administered by the Norwegian Taxonomy Initiative (NTI).
The inventories funded by Norwegian Taxonomy Initiative (NTI) strengthen the knowledge about and competence on the biodiversity in Norway. This knowledge is important for the management of Norwegian nature. In cooperation with Norwegian Barcode of Life (NorBOL), these projects also contributes to build a reference library of DNA-barcodes of species in Norway.
The NTI can grant funding to inventories that includes the phases: a) collection of material, b) sorting, c) identification of species, d) taxonomic revisions (if needed) and/or publication. Projects that only plans to work with already collected material (phases b-d) can also be granted funding, that is, projects that do not conduct field work. Projects that apply for funding only for phase d) taxonomic revision and/or publication will have low priority. The same applies to projects focusing mainly on ecology, behaviour, genetics, population dynamics or detailed occurrences. Application deadline is 10th of November.
Vacancies Collection manager in mycology, Natural History Museum, University of Oslo. Application deadline: September 24, 2021
Scientific Data Curator. Senckenberg Biodiversity Information Unit, Frankfurt.
Application deadline: October 17th, 2021
TIP: Lots of interesting jobs and other opportunities are published on the Evolution Directory (EvolDir) mailing list, and not all of them make it to the ForBio newsletter! You can subscribe to EvolDir or check out the recent postings here.
