The 19th European Carabidologists' Meeting in brief
Authors: Pizzolotto Roberto 
Published: September 2019

The European Carabidologists' Meeting (ECM) is a scientific meeting where researchers from Europe and other countries discuss their work about the main topics of ecology, biogeography and evolution, to foster a sense of community among researchers with a common background on carabid beetles, and to promote collaborations.

The 19th ECM is organized by the “Parco Naturale di Paneveggio - Pale di San Martino”, and by the Dept. of Biology Ecology and Earth Sciences of the Calabria University, and will be held on Monday 16 th to Friday 20 th September 2019 in the town of Fiera di Primiero, Italy.

The main theme of the Meeting is "Carabids in extreme environments".

Carabidae as model organisms was the topic of the discussion when several researchers met in Wijster (The Netherlands) in 1969, giving rise to the tradition of the European Carabidologists' Meetings. Since then a lot of people joined the carabidologists "family", producing sound science, not restricted to carabids' study. Traditionally the ECM is a place where to present new/old ideas, hypotheses not yet tested, preliminary results or relevant discoveries and participants are strongly encouraged to present original research, not yet published. As usual, the proceedings of the 19th ECM will be published, as peer reviewed full papers, in a scientific journal.

Three plenary talks characterise the 19th ECM. The first is on "Global warNing: what we know and what we should know about carabid beetles in high altitude habitats", and it is followed by talks on different aspects of the biology of carabids in extreme environments. The second plenary is on a long-debated topic of carabidology, i.e. "A standardized European trapping protocol – perspectives for long-term studies". The third plenary gives a scientific perspective of the carabidologists work: "Progress and knowledge gaps in carabidology – a bibliometric analysis of the last 50 years".

Two workshops close the days of Tuesday and Thursday. The first is entitled "What to do with the standardized trapping method?" and it may give prompts to develop joint projects in carabidology. During the second workshop "IUCN Red List of European Ground Beetles", a badly needed field of application for carabid research will be discussed.

The Scientific Board is composed of: Assmann Thorsten, Leuphana University (Germany); Brandmayr Pietro, University of Calabria (Italy); Di Giulio Andrea, University of Roma Tre (Italy); Fattorini Simone, University of L'Aquila (Italy), Gobbi Mauro, MUSE Museo delle Scienze (Italy); Lovei Gabor, Aarhus University (Denmark ); Plantagenest Manuel, Agrocampus-Ouest (France); Saska Pavel, Crop Research Institute (Czech Rep.); Šerić Jelaska Lucija, University of Zagreb (Croatia); Serrano José, University of Murcia (Spain); Sklodowski Jaroslaw, Warsaw University of Life Sciences (Poland); Spence John, University of Alberta (Canada); Venn Stephen, University of Helsinki (Finland ).

Seventy people registered for the Meeting, coming from 22 regions depicted in Fig. 1, where it is possible to see that the ECM is a scientific agorà attracting not only European scientists. Forty two talks and thirty three posters were scheduled.