FABI is hosting a new monthly webinar series on behalf of the Southern African Society for Systematic Biology (SASSB) to enable sharing of systematic research and to offer researchers an online space for discussion about their systematic biology research, thoughts, and questions. The first webinar was hosted on 3 June and drew a large audience including many foreign participants. The webinar will be a two-hour session on the first Thursday of the month at 16h00 SA Standard Time/Central Africa Time (GMT+2). The first half will be by an invited international plenary speaker who will share their work on a specific theme, followed by two shorter talk within the same theme by local researchers and students. After the talks and a Q&A session, the online space will be held open for 30 minutes for informal discussions and chats about the research presented, or other topics of interest to the systematics community. 

The first presentation, entitled “Calibrating molecular trees with fossils/Hymenopteran phylogenetics” was by Dr Seraina Klopfstein, Curator of Entomology at the Natural History Museum Basel, Switzerland. The two short presentations were by FABI’s Prof. Martin Coetzee who spoke on “Molecular dating through secondary calibration as a tool to infer the dispersal mechanisms responsible for the biogeography of extant fungi” and Dr Terry Reynolds Berry of Iziko Museums of South Africa “A phylogenetic assessment of parasitoid wasps (Ichneumonidae; Banchinae) in the Afrotropical region using total evidence”.

A recording of the presentation can be viewed on the SASSB’s YouTube channel by clicking here.

Click here to find out more about this new seminar series and to register your participation.