Plants, prizes and paella: Pensoft at the International Botanical Congress 2024

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Towards the end of July 2024, members of the Pensoft team travelled to Madrid for the XX International Botanical Congress, where an estimated 3,000 botanists gathered for the biggest event of the year.

Held once every six years, the congress has enlarged its scope over more than a century to become an integrated forum for knowledge on the plant and mycological world.

🤩What a joy!

Editors-in-Chief at two of our flagship #taxonomy #journals with keynotes at the biggest 2024 #botany event: @ibc2024!

👏After @SandyKnapp, @PhytoKeys opened the event yesterday; today started w/ Thorsten Lumbsch @MycoKeys!

😉See you around this week at #IBC2024! pic.twitter.com/OMBF9SA8DE

— Pensoft (@Pensoft) July 22, 2024

Proceedings kicked off with a fantastic lecture from PhytoKeys Editor-in-Chief Sandy Knapp titled, “Why botany? Why now?” The following day, Thorsten Lumbsch, Editor-in-Chief of MycoKeys, gave a keynote lecture titled, “Unravelling diversity and evolution of lichens in the genomic era.”

In fact, many authors, editors and readers of Pensoft’s journals were in attendance. And several gave presentations, including a plenary talk by renowned PhytoKeys editor, Pamela S. Soltis, on the changing face of herbarium collections.

The Pensoft team welcomed attendees with a bespoke stand, complete with print copies, illustrations and various promotional materials depicting beautiful species featured in PhytoKeys.

Lyubomir Penev, founder of Pensoft and founding editor of PhytoKeys, hosted a gathering of PhytoKeys editors at the stand, where he presented the story, latest results and highlights of the journal.

The congress included numerous lectures, symposia sessions, workshops and meetings across a variety of subject matters, all of which can be found on the IBC 2024 website. The major topics of the event were:

• Systematics, phylogenetics, biogeography and evolution
• Ecology, environment and global change, including invasive species and plant-animal interactions
• Biodiversity and conservation
• Structure, physiology and development, including Evo-Devo
• Genetics, genomics and bioinformatics
• Plants and Society

At the closing ceremony, multiple awards were presented, including Pensoft’s Early Career Researcher Talk Award. Sandy Knapp presented the award to Sonia Molino for her talk on a global study of the genus Parablechnum, a lineage of ferns of the family Blechnaceae. The award grants her a free publication in PhytoKeys. 

What a way to end @ibc2024 ! I can't believe how lucky I was to get the Early career researcher talk award on taxonomy or systematics by @Pensoft for my talk at the conference. And delivered by my admired @SandyKnapp! Thank you so much! See you in Cape Town! pic.twitter.com/Y79U1xcKxj

— Sonia Molino (@molino_sonia) July 27, 2024

Describing her study, Sofia Molino said: “To date there has been no study that takes into account all the centres of diversity of the genus at the same time, and what we have found is that it has a very complex evolutionary history, with several cases of cryptic diversity, hybridisation and rapid radiation.”

On her plans to use her free publication for a pending study on a series of novelties within Parablechnum in Bolivia, she added: “Although this is probably the country in South America where Parablechnum has been studied the most, after one expedition we have still found a lot of new things, such as several undescribed species, hybrids and new localities of some species that were only known from type material.”

The next International Botanical Congress is in 2029 and will take place in South Africa, where the Pensoft team looks forward to seeing plenty of new faces and old friends!

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