SSS: Swiss Systematics Society
The main highlight of 2021 of the Swiss Systematics Society was our annual meeting, which took place at the Musée cantonale de Zoologie in Lausanne on November 5th. It featured two excellent invited lectures, by Prof Nicolas Salamin from the University of Lausanne and by Prof Christian Klug from the University of Zurich.
We also continued our efforts to make the work of systematists more visible, by publishing a list of new species described by Swiss researchers online (New Species Swiss Made, https://naturwissenschaften.ch/organisations/swiss-systematics/new_species_swiss_made). Last year, the list included 159 new species across various groups in the tree of life, from which we elected a Brazilian moth as the emblem of the society for 2022.
In addition, we were busy preparing for our next big outreach initiative, which tells fantastic stories from the Swiss Natural History Collections (www.fantasticstories.ch) and will be organized as a prequel to the National Day of Natural History Collections on 20 November 2022.
We have published four newsletters (numbers 42-45), which were sent out in January, May, September, and December to our members.
The Biology21 meeting, which was scheduled for February at the University of Basel, was postponed to 2022 due to the COVID situation.
The yearly scientific meeting of the society was held in person on Friday, 5th November 2021, at the Musée Cantonale de Zoologie in Lausanne. It included twelve scientific talks and the general assembly of the society. The two main talks were given by invited speakers, Prof Nicolas Salamin (UNIL, Computational Phylogenetics group) on “Modeling and Big Data to understand the evolution of biodiversity”, and Prof Christian Klug (Paläontologisches Institut und Museum Zürich) on “Recent advances in cephalopod paleobiology”. The remaining ten talks were delivered by our members, six of which by PhD and master students. Elin Rütimann (University of Zürich) was this year’s recipient of the SSS award for the best master thesis. She presented her work on the adaptive significance of the mimosoid bipinnate leaf, making use of detailed morphological studies and advanced comparative methods in her analyses.
In 2021, we once more aimed to encourage young systematists through three actions:
Student travel grant: Unfortunately, no applications were submitted, as conferences were cancelled or postponed because of the pandemic. We took the time to re-examine the scope of our travel grant and decided to extend it by visits to natural history collections in the coming years.
Best master’s thesis award 2021: The SSS award for the best master thesis in systematics in Switzerland went to Elin Rütimann, who presented her findings at the SSS Day.
Free travel to the SSSDay for students: Once more, several students took the opportunity to get free travel to the annual meeting of the society, and most of them also presented their work at the meeting.
In order to raise awareness for the work of systematists in Switzerland, we once more compiled an online list of new species described by Swiss researchers in 2021. The list featured 159 new species, including a large number of beetles, several new fish species from Asia, jumping plant lice, more beetles, many mayflies, moths, cestodes, and beetles, a diverse array of new plant species, especially from Madagascar, a frog and four geckos, an amphipod, an amoeba, and several fossil ruminants. And did we mention beetles already?
As the new species of the year, our members elected a small moth from Brazil, Diptychophora galvani, which was described by Bernard Landry and co-workers from the Natural History Museum in Geneva. They dedicated this insect to Professor Ricardo Galvão, the former director of the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE), to underline his courage in opposing the Brazilian government's devastating biodiversity policy. Several national and even international news outlets picked up the corresponding press release by the SSS, which was issued in January 2022.
The year has also seen a lot of planning for our next large outreach event, the National Day of Natural History Collections, which is planned for 20 November 2022. Behind the scenes, preparations are already in full swing – more than 20 institutions have already confirmed their participation, and ScNat has agreed to fund part of the initiative. The edition of fantastic stories in 2022 will feature school classes, who will be charged with making up a fake story about an object from our natural history collections.