BIOCONTROL WORKING GROUP MEETING 7 – 9 SEPTEMBER 2004

The EWRS Biocontrol Working Group held its biennial meeting recently in conjunction with the British Ecological Society (BES) Annual Meeting. The British Ecological Society is a large (4500 members) old (founded 1913) society with a membership spread amongst the pure and applied aspects of ecology. The society holds a large (about 500 delegates, 8 parallel sessions) general annual meeting, this year at Lancaster University. The Biocontrol Working Group decided that it would be good to hold its meeting as a ‘thematic topic’ within this large meeting, hoping to attract not only EWRS biocontrol workers, but also interested delegates from the rest of the conference. In the end there were three applications to the BES to hold thematic topic meetings on aspects of invasive species, and two of these joined forces to produce one thematic topic called ‘Non-native and invasive species: defining the problem, identifying research needs and applying practical solutions’ which was listed in the Programme as ‘a joint meeting of the UK Biodiversity Research Group, Biological Control Working Group of the European Weed Research Society, hosted by the BES Invasive Species Specialist Group’. This topic ran from Tuesday morning 7th September until Thursday morning, and we easily filled all the available slots in the schedule with offered papers, and even had to put some in a ‘spill over’ session. The main weed biocontrol session was on Tuesday 7th September and contained several speakers. Click here for more details