From Geneva (1993) to Warsaw (2023) – ten cestode systematics workshops: our achievements and our future

Abstract

Starting with the First International Workshop in Cestode Systematics held at the Natural History Museum of Geneva (Switzerland) in August 1993, the community of the cestode taxonomy researchers has developed a long-lasting fruitful collaboration. The subsequent workshops were held in Lincoln (Nebraska, USA, 1996), Sofia (Bulgaria, 1999), Storrs (Connecticut, USA, 2002), České Budějovice (Czech Republic, 2005), Smolenice (Slovakia, 2008), Lawrence (Kansas, USA, 2011), São Sebastião (São Paulo, Brazil, 2014) and Rostock (Germany, 2017).

Among the main achievements of the workshops were: elaboration of the morphology-based phylogenetic framework for the relationships among the major cestode lineages; unification of the terminology for larval cestodes and microtriches (contributions of the enigmatic Lenta Chervy); training new generations of cestode taxonomists; development of the Global Cestode Database (started in the PEET project and continued in the PBI project); implementation of the coordinated efforts for studying cestode diversity in global scale – the US National Science Foundation Project “Planetary Biodiversity Inventory – A survey of the tapeworms (Cestoda: Platyhelminthes) from the vertebrate bowels of the Earth”, etc.

During all these years, several generations of cestode researchers had the understanding that together we can go further and this motivated our efforts and our success.