Authors of this website: Ladislav Mucina and Richard Thompson
General Information
International Association for Vegetation Science
The International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS; www.iavs.org) is a bona fide scientific society supporting research in the field of vegetation science, one of the core scientific ecological disciplines. The IAVS is a very active scientific body, organizing usually one (rarely two) general annual meetings, publishing two international journals – Journal of Vegetation Science and Applied Vegetation Science (www.opuluspress.se). IAVS also supports several sub-units which pursue the aims of the IAVS on regional level and in specialised working groups. After having held most of the past meetings in the Northern Hemisphere, the IAVS will hold its annual meeting for the first time in Africa.
The major aim of our meeting is to extend the interface and to deepen the cooperation between evolutionary biology and vegetation science.
The title of our meeting – “Frontiers of Vegetation Science: An Evolutionary Angle” – alludes symbolically to the challenges that vegetation science as a discipline is currently facing. Technologically driven progress in evolutionary research is changing the face of many traditional biological sciences. Vegetation science, should (and to some extent already does) react to this new phase of evolutionary research by reaching out to ecological disciplines traditionally closer to evolutionary biology (population biology, palaeo-ecology) and implementing tools of evolutionary research in explaining structure and dynamics of vegetation. The field of interaction and cooperation is enormous and is ripe for exploration and discovery.
