Pensoft Publishers took part in the 14th International Conference on Biological Invasions (NeoBiota 2026) in Brussels, Belgium, between 7-11 September 2026.
Pensoft Publishers took part in the 14th International Conference on Biological Invasions (NeoBiota 2026) in Brussels, Belgium, between 7-11 September 2026. The well-established biennial series brought together researchers, practitioners, policymakers and stakeholders from around the world to share cutting-edge scientific research on biological invasions.
Over five days, the conference covered the full arc of the field, from how alien species arrive and spread to what they do to ecosystems and to people. The conference sessions also tackled how risks are assessed and prioritised, and what management, policy and public engagement can realistically achieve.
Pensoft’s Presence
During the days of the conference, we showcased our journals’ portfolio and project materials from OneSTOP and other projects, which were of interest to the participants.
Pensoft’s stand at the 14th International Conference on Biological Invasions.
More specifically, Pensoft was represented with a booth showcasing the relevant journals such as:
NeoBiota– publishes all disciplines interested in biological invasions, specifically on the ecology, evolution and biogeography of non-indigenous aquatic and terrestrial animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms
Nature Conservation – publishes all disciplines interested in basic and applied conservation ecology and nature conservation in general at various spatial, temporal and evolutionary scales
Biodiversity Data Journal – publishes biodiversity science containing taxonomic, floristic/faunistic, morphological, genomic, phylogenetic, ecological or environmental data on any taxon of any geological age from any part of the world
One Ecosystem – provides a forum for studies in the field of ecology and sustainability
PhytoKeys– publishes in systematic Botany containing taxonomic/floristic data on any taxon of any geological age from any part of the world
MycoKeys – publishes on the monophyletic kingdom Fungi containing taxonomic or ecological data on any taxon of any geological age from any part of the world
ZooKeys– launched to support free exchange of ideas, data and information in all branches of Zoology
Research Ideas and Outcomes – publishes all outputs of the research cycle, including: project proposals, data, methods, workflows, software, project reports and research articles
Pensoft at the 14th International Conference on Biological Invasions.
During the days of the conference, we met many project partners and journal editors. Indeed, Pensoft’s presence at the conference was significant, with a Pensoft NeoBiota editorial meeting held and the Pensoft Award for the Best Talk given by Ana Novoa to Rajat Rastagi at the closing ceremony of the conference.
The Highlights
Pensoft Editorial Meeting
On Tuesday evening, NeoBiota convened its editorial board to review the journal’s progress. The meeting highlighted significant developments, including increases in article submissions and continued improvement in the journal’s impact and reputation within the field.
NeoBiota Editorial Meeting, 2026.
Visiting Meise Botanic Garden
On Wednesday, meanwhile, we visited Meise Botanic Garden, the home of OneSTOP’s coordinators and the Plant Ecology and Evolution journal. The trip allowed us to meet some editors from the journal and talk to them about their plans and publications. In addition, the project OneSTOP was showcased, and the walk in the garden allowed participants to test OneSTOP’s web app for the identification of invasive species.
Meise Botanic Garden, 2026.
Notable Presentations
While the conference included numerous notable presentations, Joana Vicente’s keynote Prioritisation in the Age of Invasion Science: From Risk Ranking to Adaptive Governance, is especially worth mentioning. Joana represented BIOPOLIS-CIBIO, one of OneSTOP’s partners, and showcased OneSTOP’s work in prioritisation. The key takeaway was as follows:
“Prioritisation should not be a one-off ranking of species but an ongoing, adaptive process built into how invasions are governed”.
Joana Vicente presenting at NeoBiota 2026.
Another important session was one on Friday morning, where Quentin Groom (coordinator of OneSTOP and author, reviewer and subject Editor in Biodiversity Data Journal, NeoBiota, One Ecosystem) presented the importance of developing an early-alert system for invasive alien species in the session – From prototype to infrastructure: building a cross-realm European alert system for invasive alien species.
Quentin Groom presenting at NeoBiota 2026.
During the session, he showcased how such a system would help the management of IAS and highlighted the work that has already been done for its developmentby OneSTOP and its sister project GuardIAS.
The Takeaway
NeoBiota 2026 has closed, but the work of limiting the spread and impact of invasive alien species does not pause between conferences. We met many project partners and editors from journals, and talked about the next steps in the science of biological invasions.
Digital biodiversity data has come a long way. Twenty-five years ago, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) launched with 21 founding countries and a simple but ambitious goal: make the world’s biodiversity data freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere.
Today, GBIF’s network includes 70 participating countries, along with data providers across more than 120 countries, offering open access to over 3.8 billion biodiversity data records. This milestone is explored in a new overview article published in the Biodiversity Data Journal, which traces GBIF’s trajectory over the past quarter-century and the challenges that remain as it looks ahead.
GBIF Executive Secretary Dr. Joe Miller remarked:
As GBIF celebrates its 25th anniversary, I’m very proud to serve as Executive Secretary of the organisation and to have contributed to this milestone publication. Detailing the history of GBIF both as an infrastructure and a global network, the article pays tribute to all the people involved in the network throughout a quarter century—be they staff, participants, nodes, volunteers, data publishers or data users. It represents the past, present and future of GBIF. I believe the paper will help strengthen our network and its capacity to respond to biodiversity data needs both now and in the future.
GBIF was established in 2001, following a proposal from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Megascience Forum which concluded that “an international mechanism is needed to make biodiversity data and information accessible worldwide”.
The call came in response to a problem facing the international community after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit: the world’s biodiversity knowledge was scattered across a small number of institutions, concentrated in wealthy countries, with no shared way to bring it together in support of the newly signed Convention on Biological Diversity.
Now, a quarter-century later, GBIF has become the foundational infrastructure for biodiversity science and policy worldwide.
A Growing Global Network
Annual biodiversity data made available through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility as of July 2026. Credit to GBIF.
GBIF’s work is carried out through a distributed network of 47 voting country participants and 42 organisational participants, each represented by a national or thematic “node” that mobilises data, builds local capacity, and connects biodiversity communities to GBIF’s infrastructure. More than 2,700 institutions, including museums, universities, government agencies, citizen science platforms, and a growing number of private-sector organisations, have published data through the network, with new publishers joining at a rate of more than two every three days, totalling nearly 3500 organisations involved.
Infographic summary of key numerical metrics of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility as of August 2026. See dynamic metrics at GBIF.org and at https://www.gbif.org/analytics/global.
GBIF-mediated data now underpin an average of eight new peer-reviewed research papers per day, and have contributed to more than 15,000 publications to date, spanning fields from climate change and food security to public health and invasive species management. An independent 2023 assessment estimated that GBIF generates roughly €12 in societal benefit for every €1 invested, with researcher time savings alone valued at €35 million annually.
Over 25 years, GBIF has continually expanded to accommodate new sources of biodiversity data – from digitised natural history specimens and citizen science observations to DNA-based records and, most recently, structured survey and monitoring data designed to support large-scale biodiversity tracking. In 2026, GBIF adopted the Catalogue of Life as its taxonomic backbone, the result of a multi-year collaboration to build shared infrastructure for reconciling species names across datasets.
Persistent Gaps Remain
A timeline of key events in the history of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Credit to Miller et al., 2026.
Despite this growth, GBIF recognises that several significant challenges remain. The global loss of biodiversity continues to be described as a crisis in major international assessments, even as the data infrastructure has improved. And the data itself continues to reflect long-standing imbalances – regions with high biodiversity, particularly in the Global South, remain underrepresented, while well-studied, charismatic groups such as birds are overrepresented compared to less visible taxa; furthermore, many marine species and hard-to-identify cryptic habitats and organisms remain inadequately documented.
Closing these gaps was part of the original motivation for creating GBIF a quarter-century ago, and it remains valid today. GBIF’s own assessment is that the network cannot resolve these asymmetries alone, doing so will depend on broader shifts in global scientific funding, data culture, and capacity, alongside GBIF’s continued efforts to expand its Participant network and to diversify the types of data it can mobilise.
An additional, ongoing challenge is data heterogeneity and data quality, because GBIF indexes data, rather than directly vetting every record, it relies on its network of data publishers to maintain quality at source, and on users to report issues – a distributed model that keeps the network scalable but is not without friction.
Looking Ahead
Capacity development across the Global Biodiversity Information Facility community. Credit to Miller et al., 2026.
Guided by its 2023–2027 Strategic Framework, GBIF is prioritising continued growth of its Participant network, expanded support for survey and monitoring data, and deeper integration of DNA-derived biodiversity records – all aimed at closing longstanding geographic and taxonomic gaps in digital biodiversity data worldwide.
Original source:
Miller J, Mandeville C, Schigel D, Gamboa Martinez J, Nielsen AM, Sheldon S, Hahn A, Raymond M, Bundgaard-Jensen S, Bagard Laursen M, Copas K, Blissett M, Høfft M, Méndez Hernández F, Noesgaard D, Rodrigues A, Russell L, Stjernegaard Jeppesen T, Elkjær Ørum-Kristensen A, Grosjean M, Waller J, Podolskiy M, Goodson H, Novakovikj S, Frøslev T, Ingenloff K, Sørensen Nilsson A, Svenningsen C, van der Meijden D, Suen A, Hakan Uzun A, Vaskova M, Nielsen C, Marentes Herrera E, Schaldemose Reibke N, Robertson T (2026) The Global Biodiversity Information Facility at 25. Biodiversity Data Journal 14: e208528. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.14.e208528
Researchers have described a new species of brilliantly coloured fish from a network of forest streams in the Brazilian Amazon, and have already recommended it for listing as Endangered because of the pressures facing its only known home.
Researchers have described a new species of brilliantly coloured fish from a network of forest streams in the Brazilian Amazon, and have already recommended it for listing as Endangered because of the pressures facing its only known home.
The fish, named Laimosemion laranja, is a killifish measuring less than three centimeters in standard length. Males are strikingly patterned, with rows of orange spots along the front half of the body and bold, chevron-shaped orange bars towards the tail, set against a pale grey flank.
Laimosemion laranja new species, INPA–ICT 062601, Paratype, female, 20.1 mm SL: Brazil, Amapá, Laranjal do Jari, Rio Cajari, Amazonas Basin. Photo: Yuri Abrantes.
Laimosemion laranja new species, INPA–ICT 062600, Holotype, male, 26.8 mm SL: Brazil, Amapá, Laranjal do Jari, Rio Cajari, Amazonas Basin. Photo: Yuri Abrantes.
“We are developing a research project aimed at investigating the evolution of life-history strategies in freshwater fishes of the family Rivulidae across different biomes in Brazil.
During our sampling in small rivers locally known as ‘igarapés’ in the Rio Cajari region, in Amapá State, we found this fish with a very striking coloration, which immediately caught our attention.”
Yuri Abrantes of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte
The research team with Laimosemion laranja. Photo credit: Yuri Abrantes.
Waldir Miron Berbel-Filho with Laimosemion laranja. Photo credit: Yuri Abrantes.
Confirming that the fish was new to science required close comparison of its body proportions, scale counts and skeletal features against its closest relatives, together with an analysis of its mitochondrial DNA.
“It was an unexpected moment. Initially, what most caught our attention was the impressive coloration of the males and females, which was unlike anything we had previously encountered in the study area. This sparked our admiration and a great deal of curiosity.”
Once the genetic analysis confirmed the fish’s distinct identity, he said:
“It was something special, as we saw an opportunity to contribute to increasing our knowledge of Amazonian biodiversity and to draw attention to the conservation of areas that are still poorly explored but highly threatened.”
The species’ name, laranja, is Portuguese for both the colour orange and the fruit, a fitting nod to the males’ vivid markings. It also honours Laranjal do Jari, the Amapá municipality where the fish was found.
“We wanted to choose a name that would highlight a characteristic of the fish while also fostering a sense of connection with the people of the region where it was discovered.”
Yuri Abrantes
Habitat of Laimosemion laranja. Photo credit: Yuri Abrantes.
Laimosemion laranja belongs to a group of Amazonian killifish, some of which have evolved an unusual survival strategy: their embryos can pause development entirely, lying dormant in damp mud until seasonal pools refill with rain.
“Laimosemion represents one of the five independent origins of the annual life cycle within the family Rivulidae.
Laimosemion laranja is particularly interesting because it expands our knowledge of the diversity and evolution of this group in the region.”
Yuri Abrantes
The new species is currently known from just three small forest pools near Laranjal do Jari, all showing signs of disturbance from deforestation, mining and urban expansion; one site lies close to water discolored by mining sediment, while another, within the city itself, is affected by plastic pollution.
Laimosemionlaranja in its habitat. Video credit: Yuri Abrantes.
With its entire known range covering an estimated 25 square kilometers, the researchers argue that Laimosemion laranja meets the criteria for an Endangered listing under IUCN guidelines, and have recommended extending the boundaries of the neighboring Rio Cajari Extractive Reserve to help protect it.
Abrantes YG, Lima SMQ, Nielsen DTB, de Lira FO, da Silva MJ, Berbel-Filho WM (2026) A new killifish of the genus Laimosemion (Cyprinodontiformes, Rivulidae) from Rio Cajari in the Brazilian Amazon. Zoosystematics and Evolution 102(4): 1079-1088. https://doi.org/10.3897/zse.102.187659
The beta release of an innovative collaborative stand-alone authoring tool transforms manuscript preparation with semantic enrichment and real-time collaboration capabilities.
Scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft Publishers announces the beta launch of ORPHO, a revolutionary online platform designed to streamline collaborative scientific writing and produce AI-ready, future-proof scholarly literature.
ORPHO presents a significant advancement in scholarly publishing technology, combining intuitive writing features with sophisticated semantic enrichment capabilities. The new platform builds upon Pensoft’s fifteen years of experience as a developer of semantic publishing infrastructure.
Key Features
Within a shared online workspace, researchers can start with built-in customisable templates, create their own or import an existing file. They can then team up with collaborators in real time using track changes, role-based user rights, inline comments, and document-level chat. More significantly, ORPHO automatically structures scientific content according to international publishing standards, making research outputs findable, discoverable, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) once published.
Unlike its predecessor, the ARPHA Writing Tool, ORPHO is available as a standalone real-time collaborative workspace decoupled from journals hosted on Pensoft’s ARPHA Publishing Platform. Once a manuscript is ready, authors receive AI-FAIR machine-readable content that can be formatted to meet multiple journal requirements at the click of a button.
The platform’s adaptability to domain-specific workflows is currently being piloted in biodiversity science. ORPHO integrates seamlessly with leading biodiversity data aggregators, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) and PlutoF, via import and export facilities for structured data, making ORPHO particularly valuable for researchers handling taxonomic, ecological and biodiversity data.
ORPHO: A new intelligent workspace for scientific writing.
Why ORPHO?
The name draws inspiration from multiple sources which reflect the tool’s philosophy and heritage. Named after Orphium: a unique plant genus endemic to South Africa whose sole species (Orphium frutescens) is known as the sea rose, ORPHO reflects the platform’s distinctive nature, heritage, and core philosophy.
It also evokes Orpheus, the legendary musician of ancient Thrace whose home region, the Rhodopi Mountains, lies in present-day Bulgaria, where ORPHO’s developer, Pensoft, is headquartered. The name thus honours the tool’s origins whilst embodying the exceptional creative performance it enables.
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Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of Pensoft, comments:
“We are well aware that researchers today face an overwhelming list of formatting requirements and technical demands in an AI-driven landscape. It is true that rapid technological advancement presents both immense opportunities and mounting complexities for researchers.
We built ORPHO to remove that friction by offering an intuitive, collaborative workspace that lets scientists focus on their research. As a scientific publisher, our mission is to make scholarly publishing a seamless, rewarding experience fit for the modern age.”
The beta release invites researchers, institutions and publishing platforms to trial ORPHO and provide feedback. Access is available at orpho.net.
Researchers have discovered sixteen new species of fungus living unnoticed inside garden and wild flowers across northern Thailand, more than quintupling the number of such fungi known to occur in the country.
Researchers have discovered sixteen new species of fungusliving unnoticed inside garden and wild flowers across northern Thailand, more than quintupling the number of such fungi known to occur in the country.
The fungi belong to Aureobasidium, a genus of dark, yeast-like organisms found almost everywhere on Earth, from human skin to glacial ice. Several members of the group are already prized in industry for producing useful enzymes, fighting plant disease and even breaking down plastic. Yet despite their familiarity, little was known about the diversity within Thailand’s tropical flowers.
Researchers from Chiang Mai University and Kasetsart University collected 54 fungal strains from 31 species of flower during a 2024 survey, among them bougainvillea, butter daisy, and periwinkle. Using a combination of DNA analysis across five gene regions, microscopy and growth trials, the team distinguished sixteen entirely new species, alongside five already known species (four of which had never before been recorded in Thailand).
Professor Nakarin Suwannarach of Chiang Mai University.
“Our team was motivated to study Aureobasidium because it was one of the most frequently isolated fungal genera from our flower samples.
We observed considerable variation among the isolates in colony morphology and other phenotypic characteristics, which suggested that there might be much greater species diversity than previously recognised.”
Distinguishing the new species was far from straightforward. Many looked almost identical under the microscope, and the DNA markers usually relied upon proved unable to tell them apart.
“This highlighted the limitations of relying on morphology alone, as well as on commonly used molecular markers.
By integrating multiple loci with morphological, physiological and growth-temperature data, we were able to distinguish closely related species more accurately. This was particularly surprising because Aureobasidium is a well-known fungal genus, yet our results revealed substantial previously unrecognised diversity in Thailand.”
Most of the new species take their names from the flowers in which they were found, including Aureobasidium bougainvilleae, A. catharanthi and A. plumeriae, while others honour the northern Thai locations where they were collected.
Two species, A. saisamorniae and A. savitreeae, were named in tribute to two of Thailand’s leading mycologists, Professor Saisamorn Lumyong and Professor Savitree Limtong.
“We wanted the names to tell a story, either about where these fungi came from or about the people who have helped advance mycological research in Thailand.”
Professor Suwannarach
Bougainvillea. Credit: Nakarin Suwannarach.
Beyond the taxonomy, the team says the findings matter for the future. A small number of Aureobasidium species have been linked to opportunistic infections, so having an accurate record of which species occur naturally will help scientists spot and respond to any change in their behaviour over time.
“This study demonstrates that multilocus phylogenetic analysis is not simply a tool for naming new species. It can reveal hidden fungal diversity and provide essential baseline information for understanding and monitoring fungal populations in the future.”
A new species of snake that feeds exclusively on birds’ eggs has been described from the Harenna Forest in Ethiopia, one of the last substantial tracts of natural forest left in the Horn of Africa.
A new species of snake that feeds exclusively on birds’ eggs has been described from the Harenna Forest in Ethiopia, one of the last substantial tracts of natural forest left in the Horn of Africa.
Named Dasypeltis albigularis, or the ‘White-throated Egg-eater’, the species belongs to a remarkable group of harmless African snakes that survive entirely on a diet of eggs, using specially adapted vertebrae in the throat to crack the shell before swallowing.
Male Dasypeltisalbigularis sp. nov. from Manyate village, Harenna Forest, Ethiopia. Image credit: Arthur Tiutenko et al., 2026.
It joins around 20 other known species in the genus Dasypeltis, most of which are notoriously difficult to tell apart, since many are uniformly black, brown or grey with few obvious external differences.
The new species is superficially similar to the so-called Montane Egg-eater, Dasypeltis atra, a black-coloured snake found in forests across East Africa, but genetic analysis of both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA showed the two are as distinct from one another.
The investigation began when Dr Tiutenko acquired a juvenile female snake from a local collaborator in the Harenna Forest:
“I received a juvenile female of an egg-eater that appeared to me to be an already known species, and I started looking for a male to breed it. As she grew to adult size, I noticed morphological differences.”
To test whether those differences reflected a genuine biological distinction, Dr Tiutenko paired the female with a male of the closely related species she resembled:
“I crossed them nevertheless, to see how the offspring would turn out and how her characteristics would be inherited.”
Dasypeltis albigularis sp. nov. Image credit: Arthur Tiutenko et al., 2026.
The resulting hybrid offspring displayed a mix of traits from both parents, providing early evidence that the Harenna Forest snake was something new. Confirming the discovery with a formal description ultimately took seven years, drawing on morphological comparisons, DNA sequencing and captive breeding observations.
Dasypeltis albigularis can be distinguished from its relatives by the pale, sometimes bluish-tinged skin visible between its scales and a distinctive white throat and belly – a feature reflected in its scientific name, which means “white-throated” in Latin.
Unlike some of its relatives, it also appears to lack the ability to produce the rasping, hissing sound that many egg-eating snakes use to fend off predators by rubbing their scales together. Females of the new species reach up to 92 cm in length, somewhat smaller than D. atra and its other closest relatives.
A brown morph of Dasypeltisalbigularis sp. nov. photographed in Manyate village, Harenna Forest, Ethiopia. Credit: Abdulkadir M. Hussein.
The snake lives in dense forest between 1,500 and 1,700 metres above sea level, in an area whose undergrowth includes wild coffee plants, and feeds on the eggs of tree-nesting birds.
The description of Dasypeltis albigularis adds to a long list of species Dr Tiutenko has helped bring to scientific attention:
“This is my twentieth taxon that I have named and described. I now have five or six species, and one subgenus, in the queue.”
Original study:
Tiutenko A, Heller TL, Bates MF (2026) A new species of ‘black’ egg-eating snake of the genus Dasypeltis Wagler (Squamata, Colubridae, Colubrinae, Boigini). Herpetozoa 39: 343-366. https://doi.org/10.3897/herpetozoa.39.e205043
Every September since 2015, the scholarly publishing world has paused to examine the process that quietly underwrites the integrity of scientific knowledge. This year, Peer Review Week runs from 14 to 18 September, bringing together publishers, societies, funders, libraries and researchers to talk about the often unglamorous but essential job of reviewing each other’s work.
The 2026 theme was chosen by community vote – 2,115 votes in total, the highest participation in Peer Review Week’s history. “Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed, and Quality” emerged as the winner, taking 40% of the vote. The result reflects a strain the whole system is experiencing: submissions are rising faster than the pool of willing, qualified reviewers, while authors and funders expect faster decisions than ever. While editors are being asked to hold the line on rigour with the same volunteer hours they always had – or less.
So, to celebrate the essential work that reviewers do, highlight some of the strains the current system is under, and show how we at Pensoftare trying to support our reviewers, we wanted to spotlight our editors-in-chief, the people who see the submission pipeline every single day, by asking them what “capacity” really means to them, and what would need to change for peer review to become more sustainable.
Capacity starts with people
Person working on a laptop. Credit to poungsaed_eco via Envato.
We asked our editors how they would describe “peer review capacity“. Almost every answer was rooted in the same place: people, and whether enough of them are still willing to do the work.
It’s about people – their willingness to give the best scientific thought to review and evaluate a fellow scientist’s work.
Tammy Robinson, Editor-in-Chief of NeoBiota, described the day-to-day challenge of finding those people:
NeoBiota editors try to avoid repeatedly asking the same people to review, but it’s very difficult to get people to accept a review invitation these days.
While for Florian Leese, Editor-in-Chief of Metabarcoding and Metagenomics, the strain of growing submissions without letting quality or turnaround times slip is a daily balancing act he’s refreshingly candid about:
Submissions in MBMG are growing faster than the time I and our editors can give them – and I think it’s worth saying that openly.
Open Laptop Displaying a Blue Network of Data. Credit to GoldenDayz via Envato.
This is precisely the problem Pensoft set out to address earlier this year, when ARPHA – our end-to-end publishing platform – integrated with Prophy, an AI-driven reviewer-discovery tool that matches manuscripts to qualified researchers from a database of millions. Across more than 90 ARPHA-powered journals, editorial teams can now reach well beyond the small circle of familiar names, surfacing reviewers by expertise and research focus rather than by who comes to mind first – directly widening the pool editors like Robinson are struggling to tap.
Freeing up expertise for what matters most
Pensoft designed the ARPHA Publishing Platform to carry every manuscript through review, editing, publication, dissemination and archiving within a single collaborative environment – precisely so that the whole publishing process is made straightforward.
ARPHA homepage
As Leese reflects:
The workflow side is not the problem; ARPHA handles editor assignment, plagiarism checks and the mechanics of the process efficiently, and the Pensoft team is quick to spot where things are piling up and need fixes.
Where he sees the next opportunity is in the technical, time-consuming checks that sit just beneath editorial judgment:
What no workflow tool currently helps with is the part that actually defines quality in our field: are the sequence data and metadata deposited and usable, are the bioinformatic steps reproducible, do the results actually support the conclusions? Those checks take time that has to be carved out of an already full working day, for editors as much as for reviewers.
As numbers rise, the honest answer is that editors will need support – trained data auditors, or validated AI-based tools from the publisher that pre-screen the technical parts – or the model of the volunteer editor/reviewer will not scale. We are not there yet, but we are at the point where that has to be said.
Prof. Benjamin Burkhard, Editor-in-Chief of One Ecosystem adds:
I think that One Ecosystem and ARPHA are providing a very straight-forward authoring, editing and reviewing system. Everything happens directly in the same platform, so no additional documents have to be filled. I also appreciate that the reviewers can (optionally) reveal their identity, which adds a lot of transparency to the whole process and helps to avoid/reduce unconstructive comments.
Making reviewing sustainable
“Recognition” was the word the editors returned to most often when the conversation turned to sustainability, and this is an area in which Pensoft has been investing for a decade and continues to develop.
Person working on a computer. Credit to puhhha via Envato.
Since 2016, ARPHA has been integrated with Publons (now part of Web of Science’s Reviewer Recognition Service), so every review logged through the platform becomes part of a reviewer’s visible professional record rather than disappearing into an inbox.
Hauber shared his vision for sustainability in five years:
A broad reviewer base, with folks at all stages of their academic and industry careers, still willing to review and evaluate peer-workers’ studies.
Robinson sees growth coming from investing in the next generation:
Training courses for early career researchers so that they are upskilled and can be drawn in as skilled reviewers. This will be good for them and the system.
Burkhard notes:
I think the community needs to be strengthen and encouraged to do reviews. If each publishing author would review as many articles as they are submitting, the problem of reviewer fatigue would be solved rather easily. Otherwise we need to think about rewarding system for reviewers, perhaps even offering a small financial incentive.
Leese proposes fewer publications and a bit more visibility for reviewers’ input:
Stop rewarding the number of papers. My proposal: publish less, and treat reviewing as an obligation to the community that scales with your own output. Review roughly twice as many papers as you publish, and make that visible as a metric. ‘Are you paying back?’ should be a question that counts in evaluations.
He also laid out what he sees as the two changes that would help most, and what’s at stake if the field doesn’t act on them:
Two things would help in parallel. First, better recognition or (even monetary) rewards for reviewers, as long as it does not end up inflating article processing charges. Second, and specifically for a data-heavy field like in our journal: the publishing field should take the necessary but tedious checks – data and metadata availability, code, reproducibility – away from reviewers and automate them, so that human expertise is spent where it is really needed: study design, context, whether the data support the claims, and whether something essential is missing that only an expert would notice. Classical peer review is at a turning point. It can be reformed, and I think it should be; the alternative is that it slowly gets replaced by AI-generated reviews that may often not do the job as we had hoped for.
Building toward that future
Past or future sign. Credit to fotodestock via Envato.
Having been around for 34 years, Pensoft treats Peer Review Week as more than a thank-you. Rather, it reflects a continued effort to build a publishing environment that makes reviewing sustainable, from AI-assisted reviewer matching to permanent recognition to the tools that take tedious checks off editors’ plates.
The record turnout in this year’s theme vote shows the community itself has named capacity as the defining challenge of this moment. As we look at insights from editors like Mark Hauber, Tammy Robinson, Florian Leese and Benjamin Burkhard, the message is clear:the field can only be sustainable if reviewing is treated as seriously as publishing.
Models help us ask a deceptively simple question: if the world works in a particular way, what should we expect to happen?
For honey bee colonies, answering that question is difficult. A colony’s development depends on food, weather, disease, the surrounding landscape, and the behaviour of thousands of individual bees. These influences do not act separately. They affect one another, sometimes in ways that are hard to isolate even in carefully designed experiments.
In a recent study with Fabrice Requier, Andreas Focks, and Jürgen Groeneveld, we explored one of these connections using BEEHAVE, a computer model of a honey bee colony. We developed an exploratory extension called BEEHAVE-PPE, asking whether seasonal colony development could arise from links between pollen, brood pheromones, egg laying, and temperature, rather than following a seasonal egg-laying pattern specified in advance.
The result is not a finished replacement for the original model. It is a hypothesis about processes inside the hive: one that can produce plausible colony dynamics, while also making clear where scientific understanding remains incomplete.
A starting point that made BEEHAVE useful
Wooden beehive boxes for beekeeping and honey collecting in blooming canola field. Credit to stevanovicigor via Envato.
BEEHAVE has been used to investigate how food availability, weather, parasites, pesticides, and beekeeping practices can affect honey bee colonies. It links processes inside the hive with conditions in the surrounding landscape, allowing researchers to explore combinations of stressors that would be difficult to study directly in real colonies.
To give a simulated colony a realistic seasonal trajectory, the original BEEHAVE uses an annual curve that determines how many eggs the queen lays on each day of the year. This was an effective modelling choice. It allowed the colony to develop in a broadly realistic way under typical Central European conditions and made it possible to investigate many other questions.
At the same time, this relationship shapes much of the simulated colony’s development. The queen follows a known seasonal pattern, while real colonies are likely to adjust reproduction in response to conditions inside and outside the hive.
I was interested in what would happen if that central pattern was no longer specified in advance. That became less like removing a single line from a model and more like beginning a journey. Each change exposed a new problem: without the fixed curve, what would initiate colony growth? What would prevent it from continuing indefinitely? What processes might connect the colony’s nutritional state to its reproduction?
For me, this was both a creative and an intellectual task. It involved imagining possible biological explanations, searching the literature for evidence that could support them, and translating those ideas into code. BEEHAVE-PPE emerged from that process.
A feedback loop inside the hive
The resulting model is built around three linked ideas.
Conceptual overview of the relationships between stored pollen and egg-laying in BEEHAVE and the new version, BEEHAVE-PPE. Major differences are indicated in red. Credit to Lammers et al., 2026.
First, the amount of pollen stored in the colony influences the queen’s egg laying. Pollen is the main protein source for feeding brood, so a colony with more available pollen can plausibly support more reproduction.
Second, larvae produce brood pheromones: chemical signals that can influence the behaviour of worker bees.
Third, brood pheromones can encourage workers to collect more pollen rather than nectar. This helps replenish pollen stores and can support further egg laying.
Temperature affects this loop. In BEEHAVE-PPE, warmer conditions increase the assumed degradation of brood pheromone. This weakens the signal encouraging pollen collection and can slow colony growth.
In one sense, temperature fulfills a role similar to the original seasonal egg-laying curve: it helps shape when growth slows and when a colony reaches its annual peak. But it does so differently. Rather than instructing the queen to lay a certain number of eggs on a particular date, it represents an environmental condition that can differ between places and years. This opens the possibility that the same underlying model could respond differently under different temperature regimes, provided that its temperature relationships can eventually be tested and calibrated.
Letting seasonal dynamics emerge
Bees Entering Hive on Wooden Frame. Credit to NaturesCharm via Envato.
Under the average weather conditions used in this study, BEEHAVE-PPE produced plausible seasonal colony dynamics. The simulated colonies grew in spring, reached a population peak in early summer, and declined afterwards. The number of adult bees in the simulated colonies followed the broad timing and shape of the French monitoring data used to calibrate the new module.
The model did not prove that real colonies work through precisely this mechanism. It cannot do that. A model can show that a proposed explanation is capable of generating an observed pattern; it cannot establish, by itself, that the explanation is the only or exact one used in nature.
What BEEHAVE-PPE does show is that the seasonal development of a colony need not be prescribed as a curve from the outset. A plausible combination of pollen availability, brood signalling, worker behaviour, and temperature can generate it.
That changes the role of the model. Instead of only reproducing a known seasonal pattern, it asks what biological connections could be responsible for that pattern.
Learning from where the model fails
Bees on honeycomb. Credit to Kohanova via Envato.
The model also revealed a clear limitation. It produced plausible dynamics under averaged weather conditions, but it was vulnerable to prolonged periods in which bees could not collect pollen.
In the simulation, a long interruption weakens the feedback loop. Less pollen leads to reduced egg laying; fewer larvae produce less brood pheromone; and the weaker pheromone signal reduces the incentive to collect pollen when conditions improve. The colony can become trapped in a low-pollen, low-brood state.
This is unlikely to be the complete story in real colonies. Colonies can buffer difficult periods through stored resources and changes in brood and worker management. BEEHAVE already contains potentially relevant processes, including brood cannibalism and worker self-metabolism, but these are not yet represented in sufficient nutritional detail to support recovery within the new feedback loop.
That result gives the next steps a clearer direction. Rather than simply knowing that the model behaves unrealistically after sustained poor weather, we can identify the chain of events that causes it. This points to promising improvements, including better representation of nutrient reserves, resource recovery through brood cannibalism, and the colony processes that help it restart reproduction after a difficult period.
The data needed to go further
Honey bees flying into wooden beehive. Credit to cookelma via Envato.
Developing and testing a model depends on data. The French dataset used in this study, covering 250 colonies, was especially valuable because it provided an unusually broad picture of seasonal colony development under comparable climatic conditions. It made it possible to see not just how one colony behaved, but what a larger set of colonies broadly did over a season.
This kind of baseline information is more limited than it may seem. For several important aspects of honey bee colony development, some of the most detailed observations still trace back to research from decades ago. We have valuable knowledge about individual processes, but less information showing how pollen availability, egg laying, brood development, worker behaviour, temperature, and population size change together over time.
New long-term observation approaches, including continuously monitored colonies, could help fill this gap. Targeted measurements of these linked processes would make it possible to test not only whether BEEHAVE-PPE produces realistic patterns, but whether it does so for the right biological reasons.
Why this matters for future stressor research
BEEHAVE is often used to explore how poor forage, adverse weather, parasites, pesticides, and beekeeping practices may affect colony development. In the original model, these pressures act on a colony whose broad reproductive trajectory is already set by the annual egg-laying pattern.
Honey Bee on flower. Credit to IciakPhotos via Envato.
BEEHAVE-PPE changes that relationship. Because egg laying, brood production, pollen collection, and colony strength can influence one another, a stressor can affect more than one isolated part of the model. A shortage of pollen, for example, may not only reduce food available on a particular day. It may also reduce reproduction, alter brood signals, change later foraging behaviour, and affect the colony’s capacity to recover.
The current version may respond too strongly when the feedback loop is interrupted. But if these dynamics can be stabilised and supported by stronger empirical evidence, future versions could give a more complete picture of how stressors interact. They could help investigate when the effects of a stressor are amplified by the colony’s internal state, which combinations are most damaging, and where a colony’s natural buffering mechanisms provide protection.
This is particularly relevant as weather patterns, flowering times, forage availability, and temperature change together. BEEHAVE-PPE is not yet a forecasting tool for climate change or colony risk. It is a first step from an imposed seasonal pattern toward interacting biological mechanisms.
Its main value is that it makes both a plausible explanation and its remaining gaps visible. That is one of the strengths of models: they do not only tell us what we can predict. They show us what we still need to understand before prediction becomes possible.
Original source:
Lammers D, Requier F, Focks A, Groeneveld J (2026) Food for thought: could the queen’s egg-laying rate in the BEEHAVE honey bee model emerge from the effects of brood pheromones, weather conditions, and pollen availability? Individual-based Ecology 2: e185721. https://doi.org/10.3897/ibe.2.185721
The 4th BioSyst.EU meeting took place in Uppsala, Sweden, from 17 to 19 August 2026, organised by the Swedish Systematics Association, in collaboration with Uppsala University.
The 4th BioSyst.EU meeting took place in Uppsala, Sweden, from 17 to 19 August 2026, organised by the Swedish Systematics Association, in collaboration with Uppsala University. For three days, the conference brought together European systematists to celebrate the discipline in the very city where it was born, home to Carl Linnaeus and the foundations of modern taxonomy.
BioSyst.EU exists to give individual scientists across Europe a shared platform, working through their national and regional societies rather than institutions. It sits alongside the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), which represents natural history institutions, and together the two bodies aim to strengthen systematic biology, phylogenetics and biodiversity research across the continent.
This year’s programme combined talks, workshops and symposia with visits to historical sites connected to Linnaeus. The main event was preceded by an early career meeting on Sunday 16 August, which gave students and early career researchers a chance to connect before the conference proper began.
Pensoft were delighted to attend with our own booth, where colleagues came to chat about our publishing services, from manuscript to final publication, as well as our tools for managing and publishing taxonomic and biodiversity data.
Pensoft’s booth at BioSyst.EU, 2026.
It was a great opportunity to introduce our journal portfolio – more than half of which comprises taxonomy and systematics titles – to old friends and new faces alike, including titles such as:
ZooKeys– one of the world’s leading journals for zoological taxonomy and biodiversity research, publishing new species descriptions and revisions across the animal kingdom
MycoKeys– dedicated to fungal systematics, taxonomy and biodiversity, supporting mycologists with rapid, richly illustrated publishing
PhytoKeys– focused on plant systematics and biodiversity, covering everything from single species descriptions to large-scale floristic studies
Metabarcoding and Metagenomics (MBMG) – a journal built around the fast-growing field of DNA-based biodiversity assessment, from environmental DNA to large-scale metagenomic surveys
Zoosystematics and Evolution – published with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, covering zoological systematics, morphology and evolutionary biology
Pensoft’s journal portfolio comprising taxonomy and systematics titles.
It was also a pleasure to meet some of our authors, reviewers and subject editors at the booth!
Alice Petzold – subject editor in Natural History Collections and Museomics.
Oleksandr Holovachov – author in Biodiversity Data Journal, and Metabarcoding and Metagenomics.
Oleksandr Ordynets – author and reviewer for Biodiversity Data Journal, MycoKeys, and Plant Ecology and Evolution.
Viktor Hartung – subject editor for Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift.
Conference presentation highlights
One of the undoubted highlights of the conference was the keynote talk by Sandra Knapp, editor-in-chief of PhytoKeys, titled Taming the beasts: strategies for studying megadiversity. Knapp tackled the question: what do we do with genera that contain more than a thousand species?
She subsequently made the case that studying genera properly, from geography to identification, pays dividends for both collaborative science and our understanding of evolution.
Sandra Knapp at Pensoft’s booth.
Sandra Knapp’s presentation at BioSyst.EU 2026.
Another highlight was the keynote lecture by Paul Hebert, Chair of the MBMG Advisory Board: The End Game – All Species & Their Interactions. Hebert reflected on the tens of millions of multicellular species we share the planet with, most still undescribed and many at risk of disappearing before they are even documented.
Paul Hebert’s presentation at BioSyst.EU 2026.
Among the other talks we attended was by one of our long-time partners, Olaf Banki, on the Catalogue of Life: taxonomic data services and infrastructure for all. Olaf reflected on the initiative’s evolution, from its origins thirty years ago to today, where the Catalogue of Life now serves as the taxonomic reference underpinning close to 4 billion species occurrences mediated through GBIF.
He gave a valuable overview of where the initiative stands: what it offers different user groups, including taxonomists and data infrastructures, where taxonomic data gaps remain, and how the community can contribute going forward.
Olaf Banki’s presentation at BioSyst.EU 2026.
Notably, Pensoft’s journals are integrated with Catalogue of Life to help list the species of the world. You can find out more about this initiative by accessing the following blog post.
A final highlight was Alexander Edwards’ presentation, titled Where Were You Yesterday? Interrogating Floral Constancy in Bumble Bee Workers Using Pollen Metabarcoding. Edwards presented work using ITS2 pollen metabarcoding to study the foraging behaviour of individually marked Bombus terrestris workers in a semi-natural university garden, sampling pollen non-lethally from returning foragers over several days.
Alexander Edwards’ presentation at BioSyst.EU 2026.
Award winners
And a massive congratulations to all our award winners! In the Best Student Poster category, first prize went to Giada Spagliardi of the University of Toronto for her poster Finding depth at the surface: museomics and species boundaries of bubble-rafting gastropods, while the runner-up prize was awarded to Hannah Cremer of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Frankfurt, for Long Hidden in Tubes: First Steps Towards Resolving the Filograna/Salmacina Complex (Serpulidae).
In the Best Student Talk category, first prize was awarded to Alexander Edwards of the University of Kassel for his talk Where Were You Yesterday? Interrogating Floral Constancy in Bumble Bee Workers Using Pollen Metabarcoding, with the runner-up prize going to Tina Kiedaisch of the University of Munich (LMU) for Intercontinental dispersal, ecological shifts and repeated origins of C4 photosynthesis shaped the evolution of Amaranthaceae s.s..
The awardees at BioSys.EU 2026.
An excursion to Linnaeus’ Hammarby
On 20 August, participants also had the option to join an excursion to Hammarby, Linnaeus’ summer house just outside Uppsala. It is a rare chance to step inside an authentic 18th century Swedish manor that reveals both the private life of Linnaeus and the scientific work he carried out there!
Pensoft notably visited the University of Uppsala Botanical Garden, also known as the Linnaean Garden, where Olof Rudbeck the Elder and Carl von Linnaeus worked:
The Linnaean Garden, 2026.
Until next time
The 4th BioSyst.EU meeting was a fitting tribute to the roots of systematics, held in the city where the discipline effectively began. From megadiverse genera to pollen metabarcoding and the future of biodiversity monitoring, the talks reflected how dynamic the field remains. We were delighted to be part of it, and to spend three days connecting with the scientific community. We look forward to the next BioSyst.EU meeting!
Catching up with Michael Schmitt at Pensoft’s booth – our subject editor for Zookeys and Arthropods systematics and phylogeny.
Researchers have described a new species of plant in western Thailand, and its otherworldly appearance has earned it a dramatic name: Thismia daemona, the “devil flower”.
Researchers have described a new species of leafless flowering plant found on the forest floor of a national park in western Thailand, and its otherworldly appearance has earned it a fittingly dramatic name: Thismia daemona, the “devil flower”.
The species belongs to Thismia, a genus of small plants sometimes called “fairy lanterns”. Unlike most plants, they contain no chlorophyll and cannot photosynthesise, instead drawing nutrients from underground fungi and spending almost their entire lives hidden beneath leaf litter.
The new species was found by botanists from Chulalongkorn University and Prince of Songkla University during surveys of Thong Pha Phum National Park, growing at nearly 1,000 metres elevation, which is an unusually high and seasonally dry setting for the genus.
Thismia daemona in natural habitat. Credit: Sahut Chantanaorrapint.
“Finding Thismia daemona in Thong Pha Phum National Park was indeed a major surprise.
Typically, Thismia species are known to occur in perennially humid lowland rainforests, however, this population was discovered in a seasonal, montane evergreen forest at an elevation of nearly 1,000 metres above sea level.”
Dr Sahut Chantanaorrapint, Prince of Songkla University
Thismiadaemona in natural habitat. Credit: Neeranuch Taosiri.
The find matters well beyond Thailand’s borders too. The new species belongs to Thismia section Geomitra, previously known only from Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra, so its discovery pushes the known range of the whole section northwards for the first time.
Its looks live up to the name. The flower is mostly black, with horn-like appendages crowning a dome shaped “mitre”, while patches of vivid reddish orange around its base recall a demon’s glowing eyes.
“Combined with its hidden, subterranean and mysterious lifestyle on the forest floor, our team unanimously agreed that naming it Thismia daemona perfectly captured its enigmatic and devil-like essence.”
Dr Chantanaorrapint
Despite its interesting appearance, its future is precarious. Known from a single population of fewer than 50 individuals in an area smaller than a football pitch, it has provisionally been assessed as Critically Endangered, partly because its habitat sits within a national park popular with tourists.
Thismia daemona. Credit: Tosak Seelanan.
Dr Chantanaorrapint sees community involvement as key to its survival:
“A key next step is adopting a sustainable conservation approach aligned with the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere concept, harmonising biodiversity conservation with human engagement.
Inspiring local people to take pride in their natural heritage not only safeguards the microhabitat, but also supports sustainable, community led ecotourism.”
The study, published in the open-access journal PhytoKeys, brings the number of Thismia species recorded in Thailand to sixteen.
Original source
Seelanan T, Chantapram I, Taosiri N, Chuchuea C, Chantanaorrapint S (2026) Thismia daemona (Thismiaceae), a new species from Thailand supported by morphological and molecular evidence. PhytoKeys 278: 177-189. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.278.202868
