Workshop 

ATBC Chapters - Building ecology and evolution networks within the tropics

Organizer(s):

The ATBC Asia-Pacific chapter, is one of the largest chapters in ATBC and has new leadership roles starting from January 2026. As part of this new three year tenure, we hope to improve outreach and engagement within the chapter members, as well as between the chapters. The purpose of this workshop is to have discussions on convergences and divergences in research topics and identification of research collaborators between and among countries as well as between and among chapters/regions.

The workshop will be announced on the first day of the meeting to the general audience and will be advertised periodically till the day of the workshop via social media platforms and internal media accounts being used by the meeting. The participants are expected to be from all career stages. The workshop aims to be interactive and will collect opinions from all participants through ice-breaker questions, and proactively initiate start-up ideas on projects that may be feasible and of high-priority across the tropics (within and among chapters). The first expected outcome of the workshop is to be able to produce a checklist of ecology, evolution and conservation projects to be initiated in the next year and identify leadership in each of the project.

Besides identifying projects, the workshop aims to also work towards possible solutions towards how intra- and inter-chapter interactions can be improved and identify barriers that we may have faced in the past decade. The workshop will start with a general introduction to the chapter by AP chapter as well as other chapter chairs (if present). The workshop will be divided chapter-wise if sufficient participants are noted from all the 3 chapters.

In the past year the AP chapter and the Neotropical chapter has sent surveys and the requirements of the three chapters is known from these questionnaires and surveys. This understanding of the immediate needs of the chapter members has helped the chapter to take informed decisions when activities were planned within the chapter. Therefore the second expected outcome of the workshop is awareness of the chapter and its activities, collecting opinions from its members, and recruiting new country representatives for the different chapters as well as committees of ATBC.