Our Division attended the 14th International Conference on Biological Invasions (NEOBIOTA 2026) taking place from 7th to 11th September in Brussels. This biennal conference brings together researchers, practitioners, policymakers and stakeholders from around the globe, with two parallel sessions each day featuring the newest research on biological invasions. The NEOBIOTA conference ist organized via NEOBIOTA, the European Group on Biological Invasions – with Franz Essl as the new president since 2024!
The conference included exciting excursions, such as a visit to the DUNIAS LIFE project with the opportunity to participate in invasive species management by remoing invasive Populus from a dune habitat. Another highlight was the location of the conference dinner, which took place amongst dinosaurs and meteorites in the Museum of Natural Sciences.
The Division of BioInvasions, Macroecology and Global Change was represented with eight researchers from different career stages and a variety of interesting presentations:
- Franz Essl: Talk “Twenty-five years of Neobiota: Building a Community for Invasion Science in Europe and beyond“
- Bernd Lenzner: Talk “A review of model-based scenarios on biological invasions”
& Poster “Spatio-temporal impact prioritization of IAS on European threatened species“ - Ali Omer: Poster “The global geography of plant invasion risk under future climate and land-use changes.“
- Fabio Mologni: Poster “Geography and humans drive distinct trait assembly in native and non-native island seed plants.”
- Lisa Tedeschi: Poster “Mind the gap: mismatches between presence records and expert range maps in global mammal distribution data.”
- Anna Schertler: Flash Talk “When Fungal Blind Spots Spill Over: How Knowledge Gaps Undermine Invasion Science and Conservation”
- Gilles Colling: Flash Talk “Centuries of habitat niche expansion reveal pervasive invasion debt in alien plants”
- Ruiling Liu: Poster “Seasonal Structure of Invasive and Native Plant Assemblages across Neighborhood Scales”
All Posters can be viewed until March 2027!
