Paleonet: GSA 2023 Topical Session T79. Better Together: Coloniality as a Way of Life and of Generating New Tools and Insights across Fields

[Emanuela Di Martino]

Dear colleagues,

I would like to inform you that Lee Hsiang Liow, Nadia Santodomingo and I are organizing a topical session on colonial organisms at the Geological Society of America annual meeting this year held in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) on the 15-18 October.

Please consider to submit an abstract to session T79. Better Together: Coloniality as a Way of Life and of Generating New Tools and Insights across Fields.

The aim of the session is to highlight the power of colonial organisms as model systems in understanding general ecological and evolutionary patterns and processes, showcasing new methods and approaches (see also session abstract below).

Abstract submission is already open and available at https://community.geosociety.org/gsa2023/<https://community.geosociety.org/gsa2023/home>

The abstract deadline is 11:59 p.m., Pacific Time, 25 July 2023.

Please, help to spread the word with anyone among your contacts that you think could be interested.

Hope to see many of you there!

Emanuela Di Martino (on behalf of Lee Hsiang Liow and Nadia Santodomingo)

Session Abstract
Colonial organisms are emerging as model systems to understand ecological and evolutionary processes on shorter to longer time scales, and spanning shallow to deep time. Several groups of colonial marine invertebrates have excellent fossil records and well-studied living relatives. Through colonial organisms, we have been able to study not just taxonomic and phenotypic evolution but also long-term patterns and outcome of biotic interactions including symbiosis, parasitism and competition. Some colonial organisms like corals and bryozoans form some of the oldest ecosystems in the world with a rich and varied history over hundreds of millions of years that allows for the study of biodiversification dynamics; corals and the reefs they form are also the poster child for conservation paleobiology. Others, like graptolites, are used not just as index fossils for global to regional stratigraphic correlations, they are also models for developing statistical tools for answering other applied geological and paleontological questions. We extend our session invitation to researchers using colonial organisms in cross-disciplinary and integrative work including phylogenetics using both contemporary and fossil organisms; research that bridges gaps between ecological and paleoecological time-scales and concepts; methods and approaches using data from and motivated by colonial organisms. Our aim is to not just showcase the power of colonial organisms as model systems in understanding biological processes, but also to highlight emerging new insights on evolution that are both specific to colonial organisms and applicable beyond them. Because a huge volume of available data and new tools have been recently generated for colonial organisms, including the explosion of deep-learning approaches that can capture the specialized domain knowledge, we also hope to encourage non-specialists to explore colonial organisms as a tool for understanding general ecological and evolutionary patterns and processes.


Emanuela Di Martino
Researcher, Natural History Museum
University of Oslo
Oslo, Norway

[cid117098*image001.png at 01D8638D.80894D10]


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.paleonet.org/pipermail/paleonet/attachments/20230508/02103d0b/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 123052 bytes
Desc: image001.png
URL: <https://lists.paleonet.org/pipermail/paleonet/attachments/20230508/02103d0b/attachment.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: GSA Topical Session T79 Flyer.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 1093005 bytes
Desc: GSA Topical Session T79 Flyer.pdf
URL: <https://lists.paleonet.org/pipermail/paleonet/attachments/20230508/02103d0b/attachment.pdf>