METABARPARK at the XIX Iberian Marine Biology Symposium

From 5th to 9th September the XIX Iberian Marine Biology Symposium was held in Porto (Portugal). It was organized by the CIIMAR - Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research -, and gathered together ca. 180 scientists from Spain, Portugal, and some latin-american countries.

The webpage of the symposium is available http://siebmxixciimar.wixsite.com/business-conferenc-1

The Iberian meetings have been organized since 1978, and are an excellent opportunity for researchers in the Iberian zone to meet, exchange ideas, and present ongoing projects and results.

Three members of Metabarpark (Owen Wangensteen, Creu Palacín, and Xavier Turon) attended the meeting. They presented the oral contribution "Wangensteen, Guardiola, Palacín, Turon: Molecular biodiversity assessment of marine hard-bottom communities from Spanish National Parks by metabarcoding of COI and 18S" where a summary of the main findings of the Metabarpark project was given. The presentation raised a lot of interest among the audience, as shown in the questions posed after the talk and the many interactions that followed during the meeting.

Xavier Turon also presented a plenary conference, entitled "Twenty-five years of genetic studies of the Iberian benthos: retrospect and prospect". Needless to say, metabarcoding was among the main techniques highlighted during this talk.

The nice logo of the XIX SIEBM

We had a good and fun time in Porto, we made interesting contacts for future metabarcoding studies. We are looking forward to the next Iberian Meeting, to be held in Faro in 2018!