Meeting: Vertebrate Land Invasions: Past, Present, and Future; A Symposium for the Annual SICB Meeting in San Francisco, CA

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This award supports the symposium, "Vertebrate Land Invasions: Past, Present, and Future," to be held at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual conference on 3-7 January 2013, in San Francisco, California. The transition from water to land was a major evolutionary event in vertebrate history that precipitated a sudden explosion of species diversity. This transition was met by numerous challenges for movement, support, respiration, osmoregulation, and sensory perception. Recent fossil finds and popular accounts of their discoveries have increased public appreciation for the significance of the Paleozoic land invasion. Furthermore, building evidence for the effects of global climate change on environmental conditions has also stimulated greater interest in understanding organism-environment interactions. This symposium will bring together eleven scientists at all career stages (graduate students, postdocs, and assistant, associate, and full professors) to highlight their research in paleontology, physiology, behavior, biomechanics, and robotics. Topics are organized to synthesize a broad body of knowledge about water-land transitions in the distant past and among current living species. In addition, junior scientists (undergraduate, graduate, and postdocs) have been invited to participate in Complementary Sessions, in which they will present relevant work in oral or poster formats The program for this symposium and its complementary sessions are designed to motivate conversations and collaborations that would be difficult to begin otherwise, generating new directions for work in this important area. This also provides an opportunity for new investigators to participate in a prominent venue and receive feedback from authorities on the topic. Presentations by these researchers will reach out to a wide audience through the publication of articles in Integrative and Comparative Biology and promotion by SICB through the symposium website (http://sicb.org/meetings/2013/symposia/index.php) and the Public Affairs Committee.