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Thomas Geissmann
Gibbon Research Lab., Hannover
thomas.geissmann@thiho-hannover.de

18 December 2001, updated 9 Jamuary 2002

Dear Colleagues,

With this 2nd announcement I would like to inform you that the organising committee of the 19th Congress of the International Primatological Society (Beijing, China, August 4-9, 2002) has officially accepted the proposed symposium on "Gibbon Diversity and Conservation." The symposium abstract has also been added to the congress web site (http://www.ips.ioz.ac.cn).

I would like to thank everybody who offered to present a paper at the symposium. Twenty-six presentations have been proposed for this symposium, so far, but more presentations can still be accommodated and are welcome. In order to give speakers enough time for their presentations, I have proposed to make this a two-day symposium. A list of proposed symposium contributions is presented and updated in regular intervals on the News page of both of my gibbon web sites (http://www.gibbons.de). I am positively surprised by the positive response to the symposium proposal. Apparently, this subject interests more people than I dared to hope. If everybody who proposed a contribution can make it to Beijing, this symposium could become the largest international gibbon conference since about 20 years.

The organising committee of the IPS congress asked me to gather and submit the symposium abstracts. I would like to ask all participants to send me a final title and an abstract of their presentation until mid-February 2002. The length of the abstract should be no more than 300 words. Please do not include figures, tables, complex equations, Greek letters and special mathematical symbols.

Several people who are interested in contributing to the gibbon symposium are depending on financial support in order to travel to Beijing. When I asked the secretary general of the IPS congress, Prof. Fuwen Wei, on this subject, he wrote: "Concerning the fund for the participants, our budget is very limited. I am sorry to say that we could not fund them to come. We are talking with CI (Conservation International) if they could fund some participants from primate habitat country. But we have not got any reply. As I know, for each IPS congress, CI will fund some participants from habitat countries to attend the IPS congress." Is asked Prof. Wei to let me know if any funding should become available. I will forward any news on this topic to you, but to be honest, it does not look too promising.

Best wishes,
Thomas Geissmann.