Carina Hoorn and W. Daniel Kissling organized the symposium 'Biodiversity and global change in the Tropics' at the University of Amsterdam together with Treub Maatschappij (17th November 2017). The speakers introduced hyperdiversity of plants in the Amazon (Hans ter Steege, Naturalis), water management in Myanmar (Teije van de Horst, Delft University), coral reef biodiversity trends in the Dutch Caribbean (Erik Meesters, Wageningen University), and islands as model systems (Robert Whittaker, University of Oxford). More details about speakers and the program.