First announcement & Call for session topics

The 33rd Conference of the
Zoological Society of Southern Africa
North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus
8 - 11 July 2007

This is the third time that the ZSSA conference will be held in Potchefstroom. The previous meeting (in 1985) commemorated 25 years of Zoological research in South Africa.

For the 2007 meeting we would like to look forward instead of back, and have chosen the following theme for the 2007 meeting:

The sixth extinction:
conserving our zoological biodiversity.

The world is facing a marked decline in biodiversity, driven by various factors like overpopulation, habitat destruction and poverty. In its broadest sense, this conference aims to firstly assess where we stand with regard to our current biodiversity, what processes drive biodiversity loss in Africa and where, as zoologists, researchers and academics we can make a difference in ameliorating, halting or reversing this trend.
 

Sudden (on a geological time scale) extinctions have in resulted in massive biodiversity losses in our geological past, most resulting in more than 50% loss in fauna. Meteorite impacts and their knock-on climatological effects have been implicated in several of these mass extinctions. It is thus appropriate to contemplate this theme in Potchefstroom, which is approximately 30 km from the Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site - the oldest known meteorite impact crater in the world. It predates all the major extinction events by at least 1,500 million years, and has been described as "...the world’s greatest known single energy release event, which caused devastating global change...".

We expect this meeting to attract wide-ranging contributions from zoologists working on all animal groups, and at all levels of biological organization, because the ecological observations seen a ecosystem level are also the result of interactions between environmental stimuli and cellular and genomic regulatory processes. Putting these considerations into a management requires input from Nature Conservation authorities and conservation and NGO's.

The subject group Zoology takes great pride in inviting delegates to join us for the 33rd Conference of the Zoological Society of Southern Africa.

Aerial and ground images of the
Vredefort Dome

Proposals for symposia sessions are invited in order to successfully address the chosen theme. Please provide the Organizers with a short symposium title and a brief description of what you feel should be covered in the presentations and discussions.

Please complete the on-line form by following this link.

The scientific program will feature plenary sessions, symposia, contributed oral and poster sessions. Several social functions are planned for the evenings. Field trips to our closest World Heritage Sites, the Vredefort Dome and the Cradle of Humankind, are also planned.