Dear colleague,

we are inviting you to the workshop "Current studies on past biodiversity in South-East Asia” that will be held June, 9^th-11^th, 2021. It is a follow up of the “Paleobiodiversity in South-East Asia” session that was organised during the 5th International Paleontological Congress in Paris in 2018. It is designed to answer the need for an international social and scientific event considering the growing interest in the international scientific community regarding the dynamic of past biodiversity in what is considered as one of the most threatened biodiversity hotspots today. The workshop will welcome presentations covering all geological and historical periods, from the deep to the recent past. It is therefore open to topics in paleobiology, paleontology, evolution, anthropology, phylogeography, extinction and diversification processes. We shall accept reviews, but the priority will be given to original studies and recent discoveries.

Because of the current sanitary crisis, the workshop will be held online. The participation to the workshop is free of charge, but participants must register here by May 20^th, late registrations are possible only upon request to julien.claude@umontpellier.fr until the June 5^th. The call for communications is closed since May 11^th.

The booklet containing the programme, instructions, and abstracts is now available here. Sessions will be held in the afternoon (Bangkok time zone) in order to allow a maximum of worldwide participants to take part in the event. Each session will start with a 30 minutes keynote paper regarding recent discoveries about past biodiversity in South-East Asia (a list of keynote presentations will be available on the website soon). Communications will be allotted 20 minutes time slots, including questions. Early career and student scientists are particularly welcome. The scientific board will vote to award the Diversity prize to the best presentation.

In order to facilitate communications and interactions during the meeting, we will use zoom and discord for oral presentations and poster sessions via chat rooms (https://discord.com; https://zoom.us/). These applications are freely available and multiOS but it will be mandatory to install these two applications on your computer or alternatively to test that they work properly on your internet browser. URL for login to the conferences and chatrooms are available in the workshop book. If you want to test your presentation, or zoom, a training session will be open on June 7 and 8; if you want to train before just contact julien.claude@umontpellier.fr.

We are looking forward to seeing you soon.

The organizers