IGCP 591 AND THE LEGACY OF TWO DECADES OF IGCP PROJECTS ON OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE EARLY TO MIDDLE PALEOZOIC WORLD

The Early to Middle Paleozoic global research community rallied around a series of IGCP projects during the past two decades: IGCP 410, IGCP 503, and most recently, IGCP 591. This series of projects was critical to focusing research objectives and publication outcomes, but also to organizing international collaboration. Now expanding even into the Cambrian and Devonian, these projects brought non-paleontologists into the fold of stratigraphic subcommissions and, by extension, helped paleontologists broaden their approach to their own research. By organizing these projects around a time interval, rather than a traditional topical specialty, they provided an opportunity for an exceptionally diverse group of workers to interact regularly and come to a common ground from which to ask the next series of questions. Undoubtedly, the work done under the auspices of these organizing projects in the last two decades dramatically increased the rate of discovery in the Early to Middle Paleozoic communities.

Unfortunately, the IGCP as a whole is much less visible in the United States than it is elsewhere. IGCP projects can be easily leveraged into travel grants and research grants in a great number of countries around the world, whereas in the US, we often have to explain the acronym to colleagues and extensively justify meeting travel to administrators who are unfamiliar with either the programme or the IUGS itself. Throughout the life of these three IGCP projects, annual meetings in the US suffered from the lowest attendance of any annual meeting in each project as well as the least amount of additional support from other agencies and/or companies. Partly this is the result of increased travel costs for people attending from overseas, but this also speaks to the low numbers of participants from the United States in any IGCP project. Future efforts by the US commission to the IUGS and the IGCP could make significant headway by increasing the visibility of both the IUGS and the IGCP through events such as this session at GSA and further integration with other geoscience organizations in the United States. The International Geoscience Programme (IGCP) is a critical component of global geoscience organization within the Early to Middle Paleozoic research community and we hope it will continue to be so well into the future.