Forams2010

From 5th till 10th of September 2010 the Foram-World met in Bonn. 374 professional foraminiferologist plus 1 amateur (=me) met in Bonn to learn more about newest scientific results about foraminifera and their applications. Martin Langer and his team did an excellent job in organizing this event as a vivid platform for scientific and personal exchange. The opportunity was given to everbody to present his/her work as an oral and/or poster presentation. During poster sessions no oral sessions were running. The resulting richness of the scientific input is reflected in the reader of Forams2010 with more abstracts than participants.

My poster presentation

from Sunday till Tuesday was well visited by about 50 persons with 15 wanting to contribute mainly images and minilectures. Online now (8.9.) went the Short Treatise on foraminiferology offered by Bruno Granier on the 6.9. with the integration of all single images still under way. A cooperation with the eforams-project (Jaroslav Tyszka) is agreed, with foraminifera.eu as a plattform to pre-present new, not yet accepted species. Feedback: Via internet people tend to be very polite avoiding any criticsm, which is needed though to move on in a project like foraminifera.eu. So I took the chance to ask for feedback. As one result I will add an FAQ to answer the many questions. "What happens to my contribution, when you are run over by a truck ? Who finances all this ? Is your plan to add 10.000 Ammonias as they will be in many samples ? Who is reviewing the classifications ? How may I send my images ?

Imaging:

With Thomas Cedhagen, Miroslav Bubik and an unfortunately to me unknown retired lady from Shell I intensively talked about imaging, stacking, digitalizing of collections and the importance of drawings. Bob Jones will ask the NHML on the permission to use their scans of the Brady Challenger Expedition drawings. See a first image of Lituotuba lituiformis, taken from a different publication as indicated :)

Meeting with contributors + Urbino 09 course participants.

It was a great pleasure to meet some of the first scientific contributors, for the first time Irina Polovodova and now twice since Urbino 2009 Renata Moura Mello, Ekaterina Ovsepyan and Claudia Cetean. Alltogether 9 Urbino 2009 participants were present and presenting their work.