from the members: On the biogeography of biogeographers

possible scales of analysis of the distribution of life across space, and how, through time, it has changed" (Whittaker et al. 2005).It is a long established field of research, with its roots in the early nineteenth century.Recently, the fifth IBS International Meeting was held in Irakleion, Crete, where the latest scientific research in relation to biogeography was presented by biogeographers from around the world.The list of topics covered in this conference was comprehensive: there were four symposia covering Mediterranean biogeography, comparative phylogeography, biogeography and ecology, and analytical advancements in macroecology and biogeography; and six sessions with contributed papers on island biogeography, climate change biogeography, conservation biogeography, palaeoecology, marine biogeography and hot topics in biogeography.Overall, there were 63 talks and 271 poster presentations covering a wide range of biogeographical topics.However I noticed that the geographical origin of the attendees of the conference was less diverse: the majority were from the US and Europe and I was surprised to see only a few researchers from South America and Asia and practically none from Africa.In a relatively advanced field such as biogeography, concerned with distribution patterns, I found it slightly ironic that the diversity of the biogeographers at this meeting was relatively low.Out of the total of 334 contributions at the meeting, nearly 60 percent of the authors came from a European institution and 26 percent from North American ones, whereas 7 percent of the first authors came from Central and South America, just about 5 percent from Asia, 2 percent from Oceania, and only 0.3 percent from Africa.So I wondered: where were our colleagues from these regions?I wanted to know whether the low proportion of researchers from outside of Europe and North America at the IBS meeting is representative for the wider academic biogeography community, so I investigated recent contributions pub-