This will be a virtual/ online meeting 12–6 PM North American Eastern Standard Time, 4 December 2020.

Registration is free for members and non-members. In order to participate in the meeting, you must register at this link:

Click here to register for the 2020 Annual Meeting of The Coleopterists Society

Click here for the updated and final program of presentations for the Annual General Meeting

PLENARY SPEAKERS

The Erwin Equation of biodiversity: remembering the “Beetle Man”

Carlos Garcia-Robledo

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Connecticut

I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the National Museum of Natural History – Smithsonian Institution, under the advice of the legendary Coleopterist Terry L. Erwin. Together with Terry, we performed research and taught courses on tropical biology in the Peruvian Amazon and Costa Rica. In this talk, we will celebrate some of the milestones in Terry’s career. We will also discuss a project inspired in his classic paper ” Tropical Forests: Their Richness in Coleoptera and Other Arthropod Species” (1982) published in the Coleopterist Bulletin. After many discussions with Terry Erwin, we present his verbal argument as an equation, the Erwin Equation of Biodiversity. In this presentation we illustrate how this original idea ignited an era of biodiversity discovery, and inspired subsequent diversity-ratio models aiming to estimate arthropod diversity.

Global insect richness and its decline

David Wagner

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Connecticut

Stork’s (2018) recent estimate of 5.5 million species of insects is significantly more conservative than Terry Erwin’s back-of-the-envelope suggestion that there may be as many as 30 million terrestrial arthropods. I will share new thoughts and data about global insect richness, and where much of that that diversity is hiding. Might Terry have been right, but for the wrong reasons? The earth’s biodiversity is under siege from global anthropogenic stressors: deforestation, agriculture, urbanization, exotic species, and many others. I will provide a synopsis of recent findings relevant to global insect declines, emphasizing where data from studies of Coleoptera have shaped our understanding.