We attended the International Congress for Conservation Biology to present the REST-COAST and SELINA Horizon-funded projects, as well as our scholarly journals and books portfolio.
Over 1,200 people from more than 90 countries, including conservation and social science researchers, students, practitioners, government and NGO professionals, policy specialists and leaders from indigenous groups attended the 32nd International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB 2025), hosted by the SCB Oceania Region from 15th to 19th June 2025 in Brisbane/Meanjin, Australia.
The Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre (BCEC) welcomed over 1,200 participants for the 32nd International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB 2025) hosted by the SCB Oceania Region. Photo credit: BCEC.
A special focus seen across the talks and overall rhetoric of the event was on indigenous peoples, culture and knowledge, and how they can be recognised and further engaged in the study and protection of the environment in a sustainable and culturally appropriate manner. Other topics popular during the week included biocultural diversity and wildlife trade and traffic.
Throughout the week, the delegates enjoyed three sets of plenary talks, and got to choose from upwards of ten parallel sessions taking place three times each day. Multiple workshops and business meetings would also take place every day around lunch time. Then, each day of the congress would conclude with a poster session at the Exhibition hall. Additionally, multiple social events scheduled throughout the week – such as a nature documentary movie night, a science comedy night, and a closing reception, held amongst the exhibits of the Queensland Museum Kurilpa – would take care of the attendees’ entertainment after long days of talks and presentations.
Our team at Pensoft was proud to join this amazing event as one of the 14 exhibitors at ICCB 2025. At our stand, Pensoft’s Head of Journal development and PR: Iva Boyadzhieva would invite delegates to elaborate on their scientific interests and latest research endeavours, as well as wants and needs concerning the publication, communication and outreach of their work.
Pensoft’s Head of Journal development and PR: Iva Boyadzhieva at the ICCB2025 (Brisbane, Australia).
Then, visitors would leave the Pensoft stand with helpful advice concerning scholarly publishing and multiple recommended titles from the Pensoft open-access journal portfolio fitting the scope of their research. If you have met us at any event in the past couple of years, you would also know that it is next to impossible for a visitor of ours to leave without at least one of our signature stickers featuring captioned scientific illustrations of species studied in papers from across our journals.
At every event in the past two years, Pensoft has been handing out stickers featuring detailed scientific illustrations of species studied in papers published in Pensoft’s scholarly portfolio. This is our ‘thank you’ to the authors who have trusted our journals with their work.
Many would also become intrigued to know more about the latest activities and results of the two European Union-funded projects that enjoyed prominent visibility at the Pensoft stand, namely: SELINA (an acronym for Science for Evidence-based and Sustainable Decisions about Natural Capital) and REST-COAST (Large scale RESToration of COASTal ecosystems through rivers to sea connectivity). At both projects, our team takes pride in leading work packages dedicated to the communication and dissemination of the projects’ outputs.
Having started in 2022 and set to run until 2027, SELINA comprises 50 partner organisations coordinated by the Leibniz University Hannover. This transdisciplinary project provides smart, cost-effective, and nature-based solutions to historic societal challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and food security. A main objective is to identify biodiversity, ecosystem condition, and ecosystem service factors that can be successfully integrated into decision-making processes in both the public and private sectors.
Most recently, the consortium launched SELINA’s Communities of Practice initiative to promote collaborative learning and knowledge integration across Europe. This digital platform provides a forum for scientists, policymakers, practitioners, and business representatives to exchange knowledge and further engage with its real-life application. On the Communities of Practice webpage, visitors may explore how SELINA is driving change across Europe.
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Meanwhile, the mission of the EU Horizon’s Green Deal-funded REST-COAST is to address today’s challenges to coastal ecosystems caused by a long history of environmental degradation of rivers and coasts. Bringing together 38 European institutions, led by the Catalonia University of Technology UPC-BarcelonaTech (Spain), the project is set to demonstrate to key stakeholders and decision-makers that large-scale restoration of river deltas, estuaries and coastal lagoons is necessary to sustain the delivery of vital ecosystem services.
A prominent output by the REST-COAST project is a policy brief addressing the EU Nature Restoration Regulation, and serving to provide scientifically-informed policy recommendations and targets.
At the Pensoft stand, ICCB2025 participants had the opportunity to browse through nine fact sheets produced within the project. Each provides a neat snapshot of the story of one of the pilot sites selected by REST-COAST as representatives of particularly vulnerable hotspots for the main EU regional seas (Baltic, Black, North Atlantic and the Mediterranean). On display was also a recent policy brief addressing the EU Nature Restoration Regulation. It serves to provide a concise summary of the issues and challenges at hand, in addition to scientifically-backed policy recommendations and targets.
Both the pilot site factsheets and the policy briefs produced by the consortium are made public in the Media Center on the project website. Further project outputs, including research articles, data papers and project reports, are permanently available from the REST-COAST’s open-science project collection in the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal.
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On the final day, the ICCB 2025 did not disappoint either. The day started with a touching plenary talk by Amy Van Nice of the Wildlife Alliance, where she shared a lot of her own experience as a wildlife rescuer, but also as a human with her own personal battles along the way. Throughout her talk she remained fully transparent about the current situation in wildlife trafficking, which remains, sadly, a crisis yet to be tackled.
The day continued with a full programme of parallel sessions before everyone gathered for the closing session and the closing ceremony, where delegates could look back at the last year in conservation, and learn about what is to come. The closing ceremony also announced and celebrated the SCB 2025 Global Service Awards and the ICCB awards.
Following the ICCB tradition, the organisers also waited until the end of the event to announce the location of the next international congress. It will take place in 2027 some 12,000 km (7,500 miles) away from Brisbane: in Mexico, where it will be jointly hosted by the North American (SCBNA) and the Latin America and Caribbean (SCB-LACA) regions of the Society for Conservation Biology.
The conference facilitated valuable networking opportunities, meeting us with old friends but also giving us a chance to discuss potential future collaborations.
Between 30 June and 3 July, Pensoft’s team attended the LifeWatch ERIC Biodiversity & Ecosystem eScience Conference (BEeS) in Heraklion, Greece. The event was organized by the LifeWatch ERIC Infrastructure with the aim of tackling the Triple Planetary Crisis (climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution) through eScience and European Research Infrastructures (RIs). With almost 200 registered participants, the conference discussed “how cutting-edge eScience and European Research Infrastructures can work together to develop innovative solutions for a sustainable future.”
Hosted by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, BEeS convened 193 registrants, featured 59 presentations, 36 posters, and provided 12 training sessions, highlighting the vital role of technology, data, and collaborative efforts in confronting global environmental challenges.
On the first day, a closed-door meeting was held with the aim of adopting a Declaration of Intent (the Crete Declaration) between the involved RIs, e-infrastructures, EU-relevant projects, and Pensoft, as a scientific publisher. The objective was to advance the One Health approach—a strategy that optimizes the health of people, animals, and ecosystems. The Declaration outlines four key strategic commitments:
strengthening strategic collaboration
advancing data integration and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles
supporting Open Science Ecosystems
informing policy and practice
Christos Arvanitidis, the president of LifeWatch ERIC, came to the Pensoft stand to meet with our staff and discuss our agenda.
Pensoft was also invited to present the outcomes of the BiCIKL project, on which we partnered with LifeWatch ERIC, as part of the Mapping Life on Planet Earth: Biogeography in a Changing World session.
The indexing is one of the major outcomes from the partnerships within the Horizon 2020-funded project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge…
Teodor Georgiev, Chief Technology Officer of Pensoft, delivered the presentation, titled The BiCIKL project traverses obstacles to FAIR and linked biodiversity data usage.
The BiCIKL project, which concluded on 30 April 2024, aims to catalyse the culture change in the way biodiversity data are identified, linked, integrated and re-used across the research lifecycle. Key outcomesinclude the creation of uni- and bi-directional links between biodiversity RIs, the establishment of best practices for Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), recommendations for interoperability between RIs, and the development of automated tools and workflows for published data liberation and FAIR-isation. The presentation also introduced the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub, a one-stop portal for understanding the complex, but increasingly interconnected landscape of biodiversity RIs.
Georgiev also delivered a poster presentation, discussing SOLO: a collaborative open-review and publishing platform supporting the EU Soil Mission.
SOLO, a Horizon Europe project in which Pensoft is involved, aims to identify current knowledge gaps, drivers, bottlenecks, and novel research and innovation approaches to be considered in the European Soil Mission research and innovation roadmap. Hosted on Pensoft’s ARPHA publishing platform and integrating the ARPHA Writing Tool, SOLO engages researchers, practitioners, citizens and other stakeholders in the development and review of ‘living’ open-access documents supporting the EU Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe.” Pensoft’s contribution to SOLO encompasses communication, dissemination, data management, and the crucial development of the platform itself.
Fifteen research infrastructures and 15 projects were officially represented at BEes, including two other Horizon Europe projects where Pensoft is a partner: ANERIS, which focuses on scientific tools and methods for marine life-sensing and monitoring, and BMD, which offers a single access point to high-throughput biodiversity monitoring tools.
Pensoft joins the ANERIS consortium as an expert in science communication with the goal to engage stakeholders and build an active community…
Berta Companys of the Spanish National Research Council introduced ANERIS with an insightful presentation on the project’s innovative technologies, workflow, and overall approach. Her talk highlighted the key challenges connected to marine biodiversity and monitoring sea and ocean ecosystems that ANERIS is tackling and outlined the solutions the project is developing to address them, such as the implementation of Operational Marine Biology (OMB) data products.
The conference facilitated valuable networking opportunities, meeting us with old friends but also giving us a chance to discuss potential future collaborations. Pensoft engaged with partners from other European Research Infrastructures, sharing a dedication to collaborative research and the development of open-access resources addressing global environmental challenges.
Frontiers of Biogeography, the official journal of The International Biogeography Society (TIBS), has received its first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) from Clarivate’s Web of Science. Its 2024 JIF stands at 2.5, highlighting the journal’s impact and relevance to the academic community.
This milestone places Frontiers of Biogeography in the Q2 category in both of its assigned Web of Science categories, Ecology and Geography, Physical.
A key metric released by Clarivate, the 2024 Journal Impact Factor reflects the number of times content published in a specific journal during 2022 and 2023 was cited in the subsequent 2024. This total citation count is then divided by the number of “citable” articles (i.e., research and review articles) to estimate the JIF.
Prior to this inaugural JIF, Frontiers of Biogeography had already achieved notable recognition, including a Scopus CiteScore of 5.5, an all-time high for the journal and the latest rise in an upwards trend that dates from its inclusion in Scopus back in 2016. It is placed in the 79th percentile for Ecology and the 73rd percentile for Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, ranking in Q1 for both categories.
Established in 2009, Frontiers of Biogeography was recently relaunched on the ARPHA Platform, where it is co-published with Pensoft Publishers. The journal publishes studies on all geographical variations of life at all levels of organisation, adhering to rigorous academic standards and aiming to advance public understanding of biogeographical sciences. It is led by Editor-in-Chief Prof. Robert J. Whittaker and Deputy Editors-in-Chief Dr. Janet Franklin and Prof. Mark J. Costello.
Professor Robert J. Whittaker, Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers of Biogeography, expressed his enthusiasm for this achievement, stating, “When The International Biogeography Society launched Frontiers of Biogeography under the editorship of Joaquín Hortal in 2009, we had a vision of it becoming an adaptable, independent, society-owned journal with a distinctive place in the journal publishing landscape. The attainment of our first Clarivate Journal Impact Factor is testimony to the hard work by our past and present editors and reviewers, and to the quality and interest level of the work that our community has entrusted to the journal for publication.”
“Working together with the team at Pensoft we are confident that we can continue to grow the journal as a favoured venue for Open Access publication of cutting-edge biogeographical research,” he added.
Elephants are among the largest land mammals on Earth and are often referred to as “ecosystem engineers” because they sustainably alter their surroundings through grazing, trampling, and digging. Europe, too, had an elephant: the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) lived on our continent for around 700,000 years. The species survived multiple ice ages before becoming extinct during the last one due to additional hunting pressure from humans. Throughout its existence, the straight-tusked elephant helped shape Europe’s landscape, maintaining open spaces and light woodlands. Many native plant species are still adapted to these conditions today.
A sculpture of Palaeoloxodon antiquus next to the paleontological museum of Ambrona (Soria, Spain). Photo credit: PePeEfe under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
“The German name Waldelefant (forest elephant) originates from the assumption that this species primarily lived in the wooded regions of Europe. However, fossil evidence shows that P. antiquus often inhabited open or semi-open habitats with mosaic-like vegetation, similar to modern elephants,” explains Prof. Dr. Manuel Steinbauer, Chair of Sport Ecology at the University of Bayreuth.
What for?
Our perception of nature is shaped by what we experience in our surroundings. Ecosystems without direct human influence are often perceived as “natural.” However, when considering insights gained from fossils, it becomes clear that today’s ecosystems— even without direct human intervention—differ significantly from those in which the species of our landscapes evolved thousands of years ago. Studies like the one carried out by the Bayreuth research team highlight the importance of studying past ecosystems for conservation. Understanding how climate and environmental changes have historically affected large mammals can provide valuable insights for modern conservation strategies.
To reconstruct the way of life of P. antiquus and, in particular, its actual habitat—known as the realised niche—the research team examined scientific literature and palaeontological databases for fossil finds of P. antiquus that could be assigned to specific Marine Isotope Stages. Marine Isotope Stages are periods in the earth’s history that reflect climate history, representing warm and cold stages. The Bayreuth research team assigned fossil finds from across Europe to either a warm or cold stage and used climate models from these periods to reconstruct the realised niche of the straight-tusked elephant. A comparison with modern climate data suggests that straight-tusked elephants would still be able to live in Europe today. The climate in Western and Central Europe would be particularly suitable, except for mountainous regions such as the Alps and the Caucasus.
Current potential distribution of the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) in Europe. The colouring represents the probability of occurrence, with grey indicating “very unlikely” and dark green “very likely”. The black dots mark the fossil finds on which the prediction is based.
“In the past, megafauna like the straight-tusked elephant and their regulatory mechanisms—such as grazing—were omnipresent. Many European species, particularly plants that thrive in open habitats, likely established in their diversity in Europe because they benefited from these ecological influences. Traditional conservation strategies in Europe primarily aim to protect biodiversity by shielding habitats from human activities. However, this strategy alone is unlikely to restore the lost ecological functions of megafauna,” says Franka Gaiser, a doctoral student in the Sport Ecology research team and lead author of the study.
Modern conservation projects actively reintroduce large herbivores to Europe. However, this comes with challenges, as the ecological processes that have shaped modern ecosystems are not yet fully understood. Additionally, today’s large herbivores cannot entirely replace the role of extinct megafauna, as both the animals themselves and the landscape structures, as well as species interactions, have changed significantly.
Original publication:
Gaiser F, Müller C, Phan P, Mathes G, Steinbauer MJ (2025) Europe’s lost landscape sculptors: Today’s potential range of the extinct elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus. Frontiers of Biogeography 18: e135081. https://doi.org/10.21425/fob.18.135081
Yet another hectic year has passed for our team at Pensoft, so it feels right to look back at the highlights from the last 12 months, as we buckle up for the leaps and strides in 2025.
In the past, we have used the occasion to take you back to the best moments of our most popular journals (see this list of 2023 highlights from ZooKeys, MycoKeys, PhytoKeys and more!); share milestones related to our ARPHA publishing platform (see the new journals, integrations and features from 2023); or let you reminisce about the coolest research published across our journals during the year(check out our Top 10 new species from 2021).
In 2022, when we celebrated our 30th anniversary on the academic scene, we extended our festive spirit throughout the year as we dived deep into those fantastic three decades. We put up Pensoft’s timeline and finished the year with a New Species Showdown tournament, where our followers on (what was back then) Twitter voted twice a week for their favourite species EVER described on the pages of our taxonomic journals.
Spoiler alert: we will be releasing our 2024 Top 10 New Species on Monday, 23 December, so you’d better go to the right of this screen and subscribe to our blog!
As we realised we might’ve been a bit biased towards our publishing activities over the years, this time, hereby, we chose to present you a retrospection that captures our best 2024 moments from across the departments, and shed light on how the publishing, technology and project communication endeavours fit together to make Pensoft what it is.
In truth, we take pride in being an exponentially growing family of multiple departments that currently comprises over 60 full-time employees and about a dozen freelancers working from all corners of the world, including Australia, Canada, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Together, we are all determined to make sure we continuously improve our service to all who have trusted us: authors, reviewers, editors, client journals, learned societies, research institutions, project consortia and other external collaborators.
After all, great deeds are only possible when you team up with great like-minded people!
In 2024, at Pensoft, we were hugely pleased to see a significant growth in the published output at almost all our journals, including record-breaking numbers in both submissions and publications at flagship titles of ours, including the Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys and MycoKeys.
Later in 2024, our colleagues, who work together with our clients to ensure their journals comply with the requirements of the top scholarly databases before they apply for indexation, informed us that another two journals in our portfolio have had their applications to Clarivate’s Web of Science successfully accepted. These are the newest journal of the International Association of Vegetation Science: Vegetation and Classification, and Metabarcoding and Metagenomics: a journal we launched in 2017 in collaboration with a team of brilliant scientists working together at the time within the DNAquaNet COST Action.
In 2024, we also joined the celebrations of our long-time partners at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, whose three journals: Zoosystematics and Evolution, Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift and Fossil Record are all part of our journal portfolio. This year marked the 10th Open Access anniversary of the three journals.
In the meantime, we also registered a record in new titles either joining the Pensoft portfolio or opting for ARPHA Platform’s white-label publishing solution, where journal owners retain exclusivity for the publication of their titles, yet use ARPHA’s end-to-end technology and as many human-provided services as necessary.
Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev with Prof. Dr. Marc Stadler, Editor-in-Chief of IMA Fungus and President of the International Mycological Association at the Pensoft booth at the 12th International Mycological Congress (August, the Netherlands).
Amongst our new partners are the International Mycological Association who moved their official journal IMA Fungus to ARPHA Platform. As part of Pensoft’s scholarly portfolio, the renowned journal joins another well-known academic title in the field of mycology: MycoKeys, which was launched by Pensoft in 2011. The big announcement was aptly made public at this year’s 12th International Mycological Congress where visitors of the Pensoft stand could often spot newly elected IMA President and IMA Fungus Chief editor: Marc Stadler chatting with our founder and CEO Lyubomir Penev by the Pensoft/MycoKeys booth.
On our end, we did not stop supporting enthusiastic and proactive scientists in their attempt to bridge gaps in scientific knowledge. In January, we launched the Estuarine Management and Technologies journal together with Dr. Soufiane Haddout of the Ibn Tofail University, Morocco.
Later on, Dr. Franco Andreone (Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali, Italy) sought us with the idea to launch a journal addressing the role of natural history museums and herbaria collections in scientific progress. This collaboration resulted in the Natural History Collections and Museomics journal, officially announced at the joint TDWG-SPNHC conference in Okinawa, Japan in August.
Around this time, we finalised our similarly exciting journal project in partnership with Prof. Dr. Volker Grimm (UFZ, Germany), Prof. Dr. Karin Frank (UFZ, Germany), Prof. Dr. Mark E. Hauber (City University of New York) and Prof. Dr. Florian Jeltsch (University of Potsdam, Germany). The outcome of this collaboration is called Individual-based Ecology: a journal that aims to promote an individual-based perspective in ecology, as it closes the knowledge gap between individual-level responses and broader ecological patterns.
The three newly-launched journals are all published under the Diamond Open Access model, where neither access, nor publication is subject to charges.
As you can see, we have a lot to be proud of in terms of our journals. This is also why in 2024 our team took a record number of trips to attend major scientific events, where we got the chance to meet face-to-face with long-time editors, authors, reviewers and readers of our journals. Even more exciting was meeting the new faces of scientific research and learning about their own take on scholarship and academic journals.
Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev welcomed editors at PhytoKeys to the Pensoft-PhytoKeys-branded booth at the XX International Botanical Congress in July 2024 (Spain).
We cannot possibly comment on Pensoft’s tech progress in 2024 without mentioning the EU-funded project BiCIKL (acronym for Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library) that we coordinated for three years ending up last April.
This 36-month endeavour saw 14 member institutions and 15 research infrastructures representing diverse actors from the biodiversity data realm come together to improve bi-directional links between different platforms, standards, formats and scientific fields.
Following these three years of collaborative work, we reported a great many notable research outputs from our consortium (find about them in the open-science project collection in the Research Ideas and Outcomes journal, titled “Towards interlinked FAIR biodiversity knowledge: The BiCIKL perspective”) that culminated in the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub: a one-stop portal that allows users to access FAIR and interlinked biodiversity data and services in a few clicks; and also a set of policy recommendations addressing key policy makers, research institutions and funders who deal with various types of data about the world’s biodiversity, and are thereby responsible to ensuring there findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR-ness).
Apart from coordinating BiCIKL, we also worked side-by-side with our partners to develop, refine and test each other’s tools and services, in order to make sure that they communicate efficiently with each other, thereby aligning with the principles of FAIR data and the needs of the scientific community in the long run.
During those three years we made a lot of refinements to our OpenBiodiv: a biodiversity database containing knowledge extracted from scientific literature, built as an Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System, and our ARPHA Writing Tool. The latter is an XML-based online authoring environment using a large set of pre-formatted templates, where manuscripts are collaboratively written, edited and submitted to participating journals published on ARPHA Platform. What makes the tool particularly special is its multiple features that streamline and FAIRify data publishing as part of a scientific publication, especially in the field of biodiversity knowledge. In fact, we made enough improvements to the ARPHA Writing Tool that we will be soon officially releasing its 2.0 version!
OpenBiodiv – The Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System
ARPHA Writing Tool 2.0
Amongst our collaborative projects are the Nanopublications for Biodiversity workflow that we co-developed with KnowledgePixels to allow researchers to ‘fragment’ their most important scientific findings into machine-actionable and machine-interpretable statements. Being the smallest units of publishable information, these ‘pixels of knowledge’ present an assertion about anything that can be uniquely identified and attributed to its author and serve to communicate a single statement, its original source (provenance) and citation record (publication info).
Nanopublications for Biodiversity
In partnership with the Swiss-based Text Mining group of Patrick Ruch at SIB and the text- and data-mining association Plazi, we brought the SIB Literature Services (SIBiLS) database one step closer to solidifying its “Biodiversity PMC” portal and working title.
Understandably, we spent a lot of effort, time and enthusiasm in raising awareness about our most recent innovations, in addition to our long-standing workflows, formats and tools developed with the aim to facilitate open and efficient access to scientific data; and their integration into published scholarly work, as well as receiving well-deserved recognition for their collection.
We just can’t stress it enough how important and beneficial it is for everyone to have high-quality FAIR data, ideally made available within a formal scientific publication!
🗨️Imagine if ALL these links were provided as hyperlinks within a #scholarly publication!
Pensoft’s CTO Teodor Georgiev talks about innovative methods and good practices in the publication of biodiversity data in scholarly papers at the First national meeting of the Bulgarian Barcode of Life (BgBOL) consortium (December, Bulgaria).
🤔What is a Data Paper?
👍 A means to describe a #dataset – like the ones on @GBIF – in a standardised, widely accepted #scientific article format.
👇🧵Highlights from @LyuboPenev's talk at the int'l symposium "#BiodiversityData in montane & arid Eurasia" in Kazakhstan 🇰🇿
Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev presenting his “Data papers on biodiversity” talk at the “Biodiversity data in montane and arid Eurasia” symposium jointly organized by GBIF and by the Institute of Zoology of Republic of Kazakhstan (November, Kazakhstan).
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📸Today, at the @EASEeditors symposium, our @teodorpensoft gave a sneak peek into the AI-assisted tools at @ARPHAplatform we have been working on (e.g. Word -> JATS XML conversion) and the #ARPHA Writing Tool 2.0 (coming up in early 2025)!🎉
Pensoft’s CTO Teodor Georgiev presents new features and workflows currently in testing at the ARPHA Writing Tool 2.0 at the EASE Autumn Symposium 2024 (online event).Pensoft’s Head of Journal development, Marketing and PR Iva Boyadzhieva talks about Pensoft’s data publishing approach and innovations at the German Ecological Society 53rd Annual Conference (September, Germany).
Pensoft as a science communicator
At our Project team, which is undoubtedly the fastest developing department at Pensoft, science communicators are working closely with technology and publishing teams to help consortia bring their scientific results closer to policy actors, decision-makers and the society at large.
Ultimately, bridging the notorious chasm between researchers and global politics boils down to mutual understanding and dialogue.
Pensoft’s communication team attended COP16 (November 2024, Colombia) along with partners at the consortia of CO-OP4CBD, BioAgora and RESPIN: three Horizon Europe projects, whose communication and dissemination is led by Pensoft.
Throughout 2024, the team, comprising 20 science communicators and project managers, has been working as part of 27 EU-funded project consortia, including nine that have only started this year (check out all partnering projects on the Pensoft website, ordered from most recently started to oldest). Apart from communicating key outcomes and activities during the duration of the projects, at many of the projects, our team has also been actively involved in their grant proposal drafting, coordination, administration, platform development, graphic and web design and others (see all project services offered by Pensoft to consortia).
📸As leaders of the “Stakeholder engagement, comms & dissemination” WP at @BCubedProject, we joined the annual meeting to report on project branding, #scicomm & #DataManagement.
Naturally, we had a seat on the front row during many milestones achieved by our partners at all those 27 ongoing projects, and communicated to the public by our communicators.
Amongst those are the release of the InsectsCount web application developed within the Horizon 2020 project SHOWCASE. Through innovative gamification elements, the app encourages users to share valuable data about flower-visiting insects, which in turn help researchers gain new knowledge about the relationship between observed species and the region’s land use and management practices (learn more about InsectsCount on the SHOWCASE prroject website).
Another fantastic project output was the long-awaited dataset of maps of annual forest disturbances across 38 European countries derived from the Landsat satellite data archive published by the Horizon Europe project ForestPaths in April (find more about the European Forest Disturbance Atlas on the ForestPaths project website).
In a major company highlight, last month, our project team participated in COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan with a side event dedicated to the role of open science and science communication in climate- and biodiversity-friendly policy.
Pensoft’s participation at COP29 – as well as our perspective on FAIR data and open science – were recently covered in an interview by Exposed by CMD (a US-based news media accredited to cover the event) with our science communicator Alexandra Korcheva and project manager Boris Barov.
You see, A LOT of great things worth celebrating happened during the year for us at Pensoft: all thanks to ceaselessly flourishing collaboration based on transparency, trust and integrity. Huge ‘THANK YOU!’ goes to everyone who has joined us in our endeavours!
Here’s to many more shared achievements coming up in 2025!
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Researchers studying the distribution of species need information about where the plant or animal species in question occurs. This usually requires a field study, which is costly, time-consuming and often CO2-intensive. In addition, not all locations where species occur are accessible to humans, such as high mountain areas. As a result, the full range of species is often not covered and the availability of species information is a major challenge for ecological research.
Social media and citizen science projects offer a great potential to increase this availability. Citizen science refers to the involvement of non-experts in scientific projects. In the case of ecological studies, for example, this is the sampling of species occurrences. Thanks to smartphones – capable of capturing high-quality photos and recording precise locations – the ability to gather and share species information has grown significantly. It’s quite simple: take a photo, save the coordinates, upload it, and researchers can use this data to map species distributions. User-friendly platforms or Apps like iNaturalist have become invaluable for this purpose, enabling researchers and citizen scientists to share and utilize occurrence data to advance ecological understanding.
Process of species occurrence data sampling by citizen science projects.
Although some people are interested in and help with such projects, they do not yet reach a broad mass of people. In our study, we explore the potential of the social media platform Instagram, which is one of the largest social media platforms with 2 billion users worldwide and millions of daily uploads. We hypothesize that even more species occurrence data is being generated on this platform, often without users realising its scientific value.
We searched for Instagram posts from 2021 to 2022 in which the tree species Nothofagus pumilio and the location of the photo can be identified. The deciduous species N. pumilio occurs at the treeline in the southern Andes. The species’ vibrant orange-red autumn colouring, in combination to spectacular landscapes, makes it a popular photo motif for tourists, hikers, and locals alike resulting in numerous Instagram posts. Because treelines are often sensitive to climate change, studying the distribution and dynamics of this species is of particular interest.
Nothofagus pumilio at Mount Fitz Roy, Patagonia (Marina Zvada, 2024 available at:https://unsplash.com/de/fotos/blick-auf-ein-gebirge-in-der-ferne-vMoLf1OrB-k?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash)
Our study began by searching Instagram for specific hashtags related to the species (#nothofaguspumilio and #lenga), as well as for locations through location tags, hashtags, and descriptions within posts. This approach allowed us to identify as many images with N. pumilio as possible, even if the users were unaware of its presence.
To select suitable posts, we focused on those where the species could be clearly identified, the location was described, and landscape elements (e.g. mountains, waterbodies, glaciers, urban and tourist area) are visible in the image, that could also be recognised in satellite imagery. For each post, we mapped at least one point at the location where the photo was taken. Additionally, we included occurrences of N. pumilio visible in the background, such as autumn-coloured treelines. This approach ensured a more comprehensive and evenly distributed sampling of the species’ range. The next image illustrates the sampling process of a post captured at Laguna Capri with Mount Fitz Roy in the background.
Suitable Instagram post (fernando.v.fotografia, 2022, left) and four transferred points with landscape elements (red boxes, right) that helped to identify the location, which is also described in the post with location tag and post caption.
In this way, we were able to generate 1238 Instagram ground truthing points. These points can be directly used in ecological studies. However, it is important to note that our Instagram ground truthing points, like most citizen science data, is spatially biased. This means that locations can only be captured where people have access, leaving remote or high-altitude areas unrepresented.
For this reason, we added a remote sensing method to our study. As this deciduous species forms mono-species forests at the treeline, it can also be identified in satellite imagery. The occurrence data obtained through supervised classification was then validated using the Instagram ground truthing points. This approach allows us to generate less-biased occurrence data for the species across its entire 2000 km latitudinal range.
All 1238 Instagram ground truthing points sampled by our approach (left) and the remote sensing result (right).
Participating in citizen science projects is an essential contribution to research. We encourage you to explore citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist, eBird, or naturgucker, and to include hashtags and detailed location descriptions – ideally with coordinates – when posting your holiday or everyday photos on Instagram. Every contribution helps!
Research article:
Werner M, Weidinger J, Böhner J, Schickhoff U, Bobrowski M (2024) Instagram data for validating Nothofagus pumilio distribution mapping in the Southern Andes: A novel ground truthing approach. Frontiers of Biogeography 17: e140606. https://doi.org/10.21425/fob.17.140606
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“This switch of our journal to a cutting-edge platform, and its committed team of editors, should continue to raise the journal’s visibility and impact,”
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