The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) will be held in Xishuangbanna from June 28 to July 3. The pre-conference training and workshop sessions are now undergoing in Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) from June 21-28.

 ATBC 2026 annual meeting is hosted by XTBG, and the pre-conference training reflects its commitment to building research capacity and fostering cross-regional collaboration in tropical ecology and conservation.

Over 100 participants from more than a dozen countries have gathered at XTBG to take the Advanced Statistics Course and Field Botany Course.

With Prof. Kyle Tomlinson as the keynote teacher, the Advanced Statistics Course is designed to equip early-career researchers with robust quantitative tools for handling complex ecological data. It begins with foundational statistical concepts and progressively covers a suite of widely applied analytical methods used in contemporary ecology and conservation biology.

Prof. Ferry Slik from Universiti Brunei Darussalam and Prof. Tan Yunhong of XTBG are keynote teachers for the Field Botany Course. Mr. Fan Yu, a renowned nature photographer, serves as the instructor for plant photography. The course starts with a historical overview of modern plant taxonomy and then delves into hands-on skills essential for botanical research, including plant identification, herbarium specimen collection, scientific illustration, macro-photography techniques, and standard protocols for describing new species. Trainees from Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other nations are actively participating in these field exercises.

In addition to the core training courses, a series of parallel events are taking place at XTBG during the same week. These include the ATBC Council Meeting, interactive workshops on open-access learning modules, a special session on the application of large language models in biodiversity research, a technical workshop on cryopreservation techniques for tropical plants, and a hands-on species distribution modelling course.