Final remarks on the 39th Congress of the “Società Italiana di Biogeografia” (Rapallo, Genoa province, May 29-31, 2013)

Biogeographia – The Journal of Integrative Biogeography 31 (2016): 3 – 6 Final remarks on the 39 th Congress of the “Societa Italiana di Biogeografia” (Rapallo, Genoa province, May 29-31, 2013) ROBERTO POGGI Honorary Curator of the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale G. Doria , Via Brigata Liguria 9, 16121 Genova e-mail corresponding author: rpoggi@comune.genova.it EDITORIAL The 39 th Congress of the “Societa Italiana di Biogeografia”, excellently organized in Rapallo (Genoa province) by DISTAV (“Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, dell’Ambiente e della Vita”) of Genoa University, was attended by distinguished but frankly not so many participants. The number of participants was low, if compared with the high numbers of people registered in the S.I.B. Congresses held in the eighties and nineties of the last century. But those, of course, were other times, when quite larger funds were available, the e-mail had not yet taken the place of letters and manually typed texts (or, for authors more up to date, with the electric typewriter), the web did not exist, not even cell phones, while databases were card indexes generally written by hand and the disastrous consequences of the adoption of the Impact Factor were long away to come. The congresses constituted, therefore, besides an occasion to go deep into particular topics, also the opportunity to meet and to speak directly with colleagues sometimes only known by correspondence, in a stimulating and fruitful comparison of skills and specializations in geology, paleogeography, paleoclimatology, paleontology, botany and zoology, which have always been the main characteristic of S.I.B. Congresses. It is now clear that the general situations of research and accessibility of information have changed profoundly; at the moment the portions of the national territory on which to devote specific attention are also nearly exhausted, so that for the foreseeable future a revision of the general lines of the themes to be developed in the congressional occasions will be almost mandatory. That said, and going more properly to the analysis of what on the contrary has characterized this Congress, which probably has all the characteristics to be remembered as the last of those old fashioned , the decision to put forward four several basic topics in as many sessions was, in my opinion, particularly appraisable.