Abstract booklet - gtö – Society for Tropical Ecology

88 PLENARY KEYNOTE | HALL H IIIPARALLEL SESSION HALL H III | ECOLOGICAL NETWORKS & ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONING 89Keynote speaker: Susanne RennerChair: Elisabeth KalkoWednesday, 23 February, 9:10 | Hall H IIIPROGRESS IN COLLECTING, IDENTIFYING, AND DESCRIBINGTROPICAL SPECIES - THE LATEST STATISTICSSusanne S. Renner, Department of Biology, University of Munich,Munich, GermanyWEDNESDAY 9:10 Hall H III2010 saw the publication of several new approaches to estimating the numberof living species. Examples, which I will discuss, are Hamilton et al. (AmericanNaturalist 176, July 2010: Quantifying Uncertainty in Estimation of TropicalArthropod Species Richness), Joppa et al. (Proc. Royal Soc. B, July 2010: Howmany species of flowering plants are there?), and Bebber et al. (PNAS, Dec 2010:Herbaria are a major frontier for species discovery). In December 2010, the RoyalBotanic Garden Kew and the Missouri Botanical Garden placed online a list ofthe 298,900 currently accepted vascular plant names (plus 477,600 synonyms),and many institutions also publish the number of species described annually bytheir staff, providing local view of species increase. These data allow assessingour progress in collecting, identifying, and describing tropical species. Theestimate for tropical arthropod species now is 3.7 to 2.5 million species globally(with large 90% confidence intervals) of which 855,000 have been described.The estimate for all species on Earth is 11 million. For flowering plants, thecurrent best estimate is 352,000 species, with 10 to 20% still remaining tobe described. The most encouraging data in this talk concern the continuedincrease in numbers of species being described every year. How do the fewtaxonomists do it? And does the more rapid recognition of new species viabarcoding encourage their formal naming?Parallel Session | Wednesday, 23 February, 10:00, Hall H IIIECOLOGICAL NETWORKS AND ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONINGChairs: Marco Mello, Elisabeth KalkoContact: marmello@gmail.comNetwork theory is almost 300 years old, and it's a mature field in Mathematics.Biologists started using network theory to study food webs much later, only inthe 1940's. Since the 2000's there has been a new boom of interest in networks,and with this approach it has been possible to make new exciting findingsabout the structure and dynamics of antagonistic and mutualistic systems. Theknowledge accumulated so far is enough to start making predictions about theeffects of disturbances on ecological networks and, ultimately, on ecosystemfunctioning. In this session, we want to gather people who are investigatingthe complexity of ecological interactions in the framework of network theoryfrom different perspectives, focusing on different taxa and different kinds ofinteraction. We aim at sharing examples of how network theory can be usedas a tool to understand the complexity of food webs and conserve ecosystemservices.WEDNESDAY 10:00 Hall H IIIgtöSociety for Tropical Ecology | Gesellschaft für Tropenökologie e.V. Status and future of tropical biodiversity | Frankfurt, 21 - 24 February 2011gtö