XXIII Congreso Sociedad Mesoamericana para la Biología y la Conservación

The XXIII Congreso Sociedad Mesoamericana para la Biología y la Conservación is an annual conference that brings together biologists from Mesoamerica and some other countries, interested in conservation biology. It took place from 28-31 October 2019 in Antigua, Guatemala.

This congress provides an excellent opportunity to spread the advances in several fields of Conservation Biology within Mesoamerica, to share experience and knowledge, and to strengthen or develop new contacts with researchers from other countries.

The event was attended by Joana Paupério that was invited as keynote speakers of the conference, to present their work in conservation genetics and environmental metabarcoding. She presented the talk entitled “Barcoding biodiversity: From species detection to freshwater biomonitoring using eDNA metabarcoding” and was also invited to close and synthetize one of the symposium on the main theme of the conference “Conservácion de los servicios ecossistémicos para la seguridad hidrica”.

The presentation of the work in the plenary talks raised a lot of interest in the participants of the conference. It also gave the possibility to meet the people responsible for the BioAlfa initiave (https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/bold-project-hopes-to-dna-barcode-every-species-in-costa-rica/), in the scope of which Costa Rica aims to use DNA Barcoding to identify Costa Rica’s million plus species. Furthermore, another contact opened the possibility of organising a course of DNA Barcoding in the University of Tolima in Colombia.