The 7th Annual Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) Asia-Pacific Chapter was held in Banda Aceh, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, from March 18-22, 2013. This follows successful meetings in Mahabalipuram, India (2007), Kuching, Malaysia (2008), Chiang Mai, Thailand (2009), Bali, Indonesia (2010), Bangkok, Thailand (2011), and XTBG (2012). The 2013 meeting was attended by nearly 200 researchers, students and conservation practitioners from around the region, including Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. The theme was ‘Linking Biodiversity Science to Policy and Conservation Action’, but the presentations and posters covered the full range of modern tropical biology.  

XTBG was involved in the foundation of the Asia-Pacific Chapter at the ATBC meeting in Kunming in 2006 and the Gardens have been well-represented at all the meetings. Nine staff and students from XTBG gave presentations or posters in Aceh and Ferry Slik organized a symposium on ‘Biogeography, Biodiversity and Bioinformatics of the Tropical Asian Flora’. XTBG presentations included: 

Ferry Slik: Variation in large tree density drives forest aboveground biomass variation in moist lowland forests across the tropics. 

Ge Tang: Phylogenetic diversity and composition patterns of Yunnan’s woody plant flora. 

Masatoshi Katabuchi: Negative density dependence reduces survival rates of common tree species in a species-rich tropical rain forest. 

Mareike Roeder: Phylogenetic structure of liana communities along a disturbance gradient in a montane forest, Xishuangbanna, China.　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　   

Eben Goodale: Buffer zones and birds in the Western Ghats/Sri Lanka hotspot: changes in abundance, diversity and species composition over the forest to agriculture gradient. 

A professor: Frugivory and seed dispersal: what don’t we know?  

Rachakonda Sreekar: Hunting impacts on birds in Bulong Nature Reserve, Yunnan, China. 

Uromi Manage Goodale: Designing restoration protocols from seedling functional traits.　　　　  

Manichanh Satdichan won the prize for Best Student Poster. 

The next ATBC Asia-Pacific Chapter meeting will be combined with the main ATBC annual meeting in 2014 and held in Cairns, Australia, 20-25 July. This will be the largest tropical biology conference in 2014 and an ideal opportunity for XTBG to showcase its research in tropical biology and conservation in front of a global audience.