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The “sea capital” of Bulgaria, the city of Varna, hosted a very special occasion during the past week – an international conference marking the 20th anniversary of the LTER-BG network. Over the past two decades, its members have been dedicated to establishing roadmaps and infrastructures for generating, consolidating and sharing ecosystem research data across the Balkan country and beyond.
In celebration of this milestone, members of the wider eLTER community, encompassing the whole of Europe, contributed to a three-day agenda packed with progress updates, innovative showcases and meaningful discussions on the past and future of long-term ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological research.
Pensoft Publishers has served as the communication and dissemination partner for the eLTER Research Infrastructure for the past six years. Pensoft has also always supported the activities of LTER Bulgaria.
For this 20th anniversary conference, all 55 abstracts for oral and poster presentations were organised and published in a special collection titled “Long-Term Ecosystem Research: Contributions, Challenges and Future Perspectives” on the ARPHA Conference Abstracts, and for less than a week it has already garnered over 6,000 views.
Conference abstracts published in ARPHA Conference Abstracts.
Impressed by the statements of engagement made by young scientists within the eLTER community, the Pensoft team supported the organisers’ idea to provide an Early Career Scientist Award, which granted its recipient a free publication in the One Ecosystem journal.
Following a unanimous vote by the dedicated jury members Svetla Doncheva, Vesela Evtimova, Elena Todorova and Alexandra Tzvetkova, early career researcher Sabica Naz from the Slovak Academy of Sciences was selected as the winner. She distinguished herself with the presentation “Impacts of pre-season climatic and functional drivers on the spring onset of phenocam-derived GCC”.
As the official communication partner of eLTER and its affiliated projects, Pensoft provided dissemination materials by eLTER RI at the dedicated booth where attendees also had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the company’s wider publishing and research project portfolio.
At the booth, participants could get acquainted with Pensoft’s wider scientific journal portfolio. With One Ecosystem and Nature Conservation covering ecosystem science and conservation practices, NeoBiota focuses on biological invasions and Advances in Pollinator Research dedicated to all things pollinator science. Individual-based Ecology publishes research on individual-level ecological processes while the Biodiversity Data Journal supports the publication of biodiversity data. Alongside these, Research Ideas and Outcomes offers a platform for sharing research across the whole project cycle, from proposals to final results.
Beyond these commitments, Pensoft was front and centre within the event’s agenda as well.
During the opening panel, Alexandra Tzvetkova, part of the Pensoft team working for eLTER RI, welcomed the participants, reminded them to start sharing the special collection of abstracts with their networks and highlighted the innovative propositions from Pensoft that were about to be presented in the next days and could be very useful for the eLTER community in the future – Scientiana and ORPHO.
Further, two Pensoft presentations were delivered as part of the thematic session “Emerging Technologies in Ecosystem Research, Data Management and Open Science in LTER”, and brought the audience closer to the publisher’s vision for the future:
Senior Communications Officer Peter Bozakov delved into the forthcoming science communication platform for research projects Scientiana. Launching in early 2027, it is set to be a portal for consolidating knowledge, mapping out collaborations and innovating outreach in the context of past, present and future scientific initiatives at all scales.
While, Events and Marketing Coordinator Victoria Stoyanova explored the new frontiers that an AI-FAIR outlook unveils in the domain of academic publishing. Specifically, she showcased the evolution of the ARPHA platform and the newly launched ORPHO, Pensoft’s next-gen collaborative writing tool, as examples of innovation placed directly in the hands of authors.
Together, ARPHA and ORPHO support the entire manuscript workflow from submission to publication, with structuring, taxon tagging, classification, and data publication taking place as part of the publication process itself.
The presentations proved themselves a stepping stone to further discussions on potential collaborations with scientists, conversations that were bolstered by on-site demonstrations of the tools in question.
The conference in Varna was enjoyable, fruitful and full of hope and esteem for the better future of long-term ecosystem research. And our Pensoft team left with many ideas and an affirmed ambition to keep working to provide better solutions and services for the development of European science. What we will always remember are the words of our host – the national coordinator of LTER Bulgaria in the past 20 years, Svetla Doncheva-Bratanova:
I would like to thank the Pensoft team for the wonderful participation in the conference. You are amazing and I am certain we could do wonders together!
Many thanks to the Bulgarian LTER community and the wider eLTER community for bringing together so many passionate researchers and making these past few days special.