It is a great honor for us, Faculty of Forestry of Hasanuddin University, to host the 2nd Biennial Conference of Tropical Biodiversity 2021 (BCTB) 2021 on August 4th - 5th, 2021, in Makassar City of South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia. This conference is a series of international scientific seminars held by the Faculty of Agriculture, Universitas Hasanuddin, Makassar, Indonesia, held biennially since 2018. In addition, The proceedings of BCTB have been published in the IOP conference series: Earth and Environmental Science (EES).
Biodiversity is evenly distributed and varies widely across the world and within regions, the diversity of which is highly dependent on environmental factors such as temperature, rainfall, altitude, soil geography, and the presence of other species. Biodiversity is also essential in supporting ecosystem services, including air quality, climate, carbon dioxide absorption, water purification, pollination, and erosion prevention. Rapid environmental changes have led to many mass extinctions of species. Therefore, protecting its existence has become one of the most significant challenges humanity has to face.
The Biennial Conference of Tropical Biodiversity is a scientific forum to enhance science and technology, together with researchers, scientists, practitioners, and scholars to anticipate the impacts of climate change in biodiversity. This is also conducted to promote Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Hence, this conference chose an SDGs-related theme, namely “Managing Challenges in Biodiversity Conservation During The Pandemic to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals for Better Environment” with six sub-themes:
1. Assessment of global biodiversity: the impact of a pandemic to biodiversity.
2. The existence of genetic diversity to maintain biodiversity.
3. Community partnership for biodiversity conservation.
4. Biodiversity and utilization.
5. The conservation of tropical biodiversity: current challenges for the management.
6. Ecological risk and natural disaster.
The Biennial Conference of Tropical Biodiversity will be held every two years. The first was in 2018, and the second should be in 2019. Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, the conference was postponed to be this year (2021). Hence, the conference model has performed with a virtual conference instead of a live meeting.
This conference presents keynote speakers from 5 countries, namely Prof. Enrico Bonello from Ohio State University, USA, Dr. Doan Nainggolan from Aarhus University-Denmark, Prof. Erin P. Riley from San Diego State University-USA, Dr. Ida Ayu Pradnya Resosudarmo from Australian National University-Australia, and Prof. Supratman from Hasanuddin University-Indonesia. The plenary session and discussion for all speakers were for 3 hours. Participant presentations (oral and video presentations) were held in 3 sessions, and each session was divided into ten rooms. The number of participants per room was 15-20 participants with an allocation of presentations for 5 minutes/participant conducted in parallel as many as three parallel sessions. Discussions sessions were held in parallel in each parallel session with an allocation of 3 minutes per participant. The Virtual BCTB conference implementation applied the zoom meeting application provided by the Faculty of Forestry, Universitas Hasanuddin.
List of Conference Committee & Reviewer BCTB 2021 are available in this pdf.
Potential of an Automated- and Image-Based Cell Counter to Accelerate Microalgal Research and Applications
