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.
Official group photo of the delegates at ESP11 (Darwin, Australia). Courtesy of the Ecosystem Services Partnership.
Between 22nd and 26th June, the 11th Ecosystem Services Partnership World Conference (ESP11) brought about 250 international delegates from diverse backgrounds: professional and demographic alike, to the Darwin Convention Centre in the capital city of the Northern Territory, Australia.
Amongst the central topics of the event were the integrations of local and indigenous values and knowledge into the understanding of ecosystem services and their sustainable management; the implementation of nature-based solutions into practice; and the collaboration of scientists with policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders.
Cultural diversity was specially celebrated at both the opening and the closing ceremonies, as well as the special conference dinner. Attendees enjoyed multiple traditional performances from the region, but also from other parts of the world. They also had the chance to hear directly from members of Darwin’s indigenous communities about their own perspectives on ecosystem services and their sustainable management.
Indigenous Australian performance at the opening ceremony at ESP11 (Darwin, Australia).
During the week, each day would open with keynote speeches by renowned scientists from around the world. The programme would then continue with a set of six parallel sessions. The conference also included poster sessions, a conference dinner and field trips meant to provide the conference participants with a face-to-face encounter with Australian natural phenomena, including close-up encounters with the signature Northern Territory fauna, such as crocodiles, birds and sea turtles.
One of the field trips took participants to the uninhabited Bare Sand Island where they got the chance to see up close a Flatback sea turtle coming out of the water, making her nest and laying her eggs before making her way back to the waves under the cover of the night.
At the Pensoft stand, delegates met Pensoft’s Head of Journal development and PR: Iva Boyadzhieva, who would answer their questions about the various publishing opportunities and scholarly resources by the publisher, but also about the latest activities and results of the Horizon Europe-funded project SELINA (an acronym for Science for Evidence-based and Sustainable Decisions about Natural Capital).
Pensoft’s stand at the ESP11 conference in Darwin, Australia.
Having started in 2022 and set to run until 2027, SELINA comprises 50 partner organisations coordinated by the Leibniz University Hannover and Prof. Dr. Benjamin Burkhard (Leibniz University Hannover, Germany), who is also co-Chair of the ESP and Editor-in-Chief of the One Ecosystem journal. As an experienced science communicator and open-science publisher, at SELINA, Pensoft has been assigned to lead the project’s communication and dissemination activities.
The transdisciplinary project aims to provide smart, cost-effective, and nature-based solutions to historic societal challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and food security. One of the consortium’s main objectives 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, visitors may explore how SELINA is driving change across Europe.
Once again, all around the venue one could easily catch a glimpse of both local and exotic biodiversity that had taken cover on the laptops of the participants. The vivid stickers have become a signature Pensoft freebies that feature scientific illustration of species discussed in publications from across the publisher’s scholarly portfolio in a nod to the authors who have chosen a journal from the Pensoft scholarly portfolio.
Those who have missed the opportunity to sign up for those journals’ newsletters at the stand, can do this by filling in their email address from the homepage of the journal they fancy or by updating their profiles in the Pensoft system.
Understandably, the highlight in the Pensoft’s journal portfolio for ESP11 delegates was One Ecosystem, which was once born in a collaboration between Pensoft, the predecessor of SELINA: ESMERALDA, and the ESP community itself.
Since its launch in 2016, the open-access peer-reviewed journal has published about 200 research papers, including field-specific research outputs typically falling outside of what traditional scientific journals would see as a publication. These include Software description, Methods, Ecosystem Services Mapping, Ecosystem Accounting Table amongst others. You can find about the origins of One Ecosystem in the 2016 launching editorial. A few years ago, the journal became part of the scholarly literature databases of both Scopus and Web of Science. In fact, the latest Scopus CiteScore of One Ecosystem places the journal in Q1 in all five categories it has been assigned to.
At a special session within the ESP11 programme, Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Benjamin Burkhard welcomed various questions concerning the One Ecosystem journal.
As part of the ESP11 programme, a session dedicated on the open-science approach of One Ecosystem that relies on opening up diverse research outputs and data, in order to prompt transparency, reusability and interdisciplinary in ecological research. Together, Pensoft’s Iva Boyadzhieva, Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Benjamin Burkhard and subject editor Dr. Paulo Pereira talked about the journal and addressed the questions of the audience, while also providing general advice on scholarly publishing and editorial work to early career researchers at the session.
The session also presented the announcement that in 2025, ESP members are eligible for a 10% discount on the APC at One Ecosystem.
As usual, the conference closed with an engaging and heart-warming ceremony, where the organisers paid another tribute to local communities and volunteers who made the event an unforgettable experience for everyone. The ceremony finished with the awards for the three best posters presented at ESP11.
Hamid Arrum Harahap was awarded first place for his poster “Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EbA) to Climate Change for Indigenous Women in the Mentawai Islands and Aceh Singkil, Sumatra (Indonesia)”.
Hamid Arrum Harahap (Universitas Andalas, Indonesia), Nicole Boyd (Charles Darwin University) and Gail Sucharitakul (Imperial College of London, United Kingdom) were recognised for their research posters.
“My poster highlights the climate knowledge of Indigenous women in the Mentawai Islands and Aceh Singkil. Their voices are often underrepresented in climate discourse, despite contributing the least to climate change and being among the most affected by its impacts”
said first-place sitter Hamid Arrum Harahap about his poster, titled “Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EbA) to Climate Change for Indigenous Women in the Mentawai Islands and Aceh Singkil, Sumatra (Indonesia)”.
“In regions where downscaling climate models is difficult, intergenerational knowledge passed through indigenous women is critical. Our study highlights that while our climate models from modern science are built on numbers and projections, Indigenous women’s climate memories are rooted in stories and emotions—together, they offer complementary insights for understanding and adapting to climate change.”
In addition to the prizes handed by the ESP, he received a waiver for a free publication at One Ecosystem from the journal’s publisher Pensoft.
“I plan to use this opportunity to publish my research on Indigenous knowledge and ecosystem services. I am currently working on two studies: one on the relational values of ecosystem services governance with Indigenous Batak communities, and the other on ecosystem-based adaptation and the vulnerability of ecosystem services to climate change, focusing on Indigenous women in Sumatra and Far North Queensland, Australia. I believe One Ecosystem is an ideal platform for this work, as it offers an innovative and accessible forum for multidisciplinary studies like mine and focusing on sustainability of the ecosystem.
he added.
Third-placed Gail Sucharitakul received a copy of “Mapping Ecosystem Service”: a best-seller in Pensoft’s scientific book portfolio, edited by Prof. Dr. Benjamin Burkhard and Dr. Joachim Maes (European Commission DG Environment): both well-renowned in the field and the ESP community scientists. Maes is also a Deputy Editor-in-Chief at One Ecosystem.
Now that the ESP11 World Conference has turned into a wonderful memory, we set our sights on the 2016 European conference, which will be taking place in historic Prague, Czech Republic. See you there!
Bulgaria officially joins the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This major event for Bulgarian science was initiated by a memorandum signed by the Minister of Environment and Water: Manol Genov.
GBIF is an international network and data infrastructure funded by governments around the world that provides international open access to a modern and comprehensive database of all species of living organisms on the planet.
Joining GBIF is an important step for initiatives such as the Bulgarian Barcode of Life (BgBOL), as it will facilitate the integration of genetic data on species diversity into the global scientific community and support the creation of a more accurate and accessible bioinformatic database. This will increase the scientific visibility and relevance of Bulgarian efforts in molecular taxonomy and conservation.
“First of all, I’d like to congratulate all fellow scientists working in the domain of biology and ecology in Bulgaria with this wonderful achievement,” says Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of the scientific publisher and technology provider Pensoft, as well as a key participant in the talks and preparations for Bulgaria’s joining GBIF. He is also Chair of BgBOL.
“Becoming a full member of GBIF has been a long-anticipated milestone we have discussed and worked on for several years. Coming not long after we initiated the Bulgarian Barcode of Life, the Bulgarian membership in GBIF gives us yet another uncontested evidence that the nation is on the right path to preserving our uniquely rich fauna and flora,” he adds.
Pensoft is looking forward to sharing our know-how with Bulgarian institutions and scientists in order to streamline the visibility and overall efficiency of biodiversity data collected from Bulgaria.
Prof. Lyubomir Penev
“As close partners of GBIF for over 15 years now, Pensoft is looking forward to sharing our know-how with Bulgarian institutions and scientists, so that they can fully utilise the GBIF infrastructure and tools, in order to streamline the visibility and overall efficiency of biodiversity data collected from Bulgaria.”
GBIF is managed by a Secretariat based in Copenhagen and brings together countries and organisations that collaborate through national and institutional coordinators (also called participant nodes). The mechanism provides common standards, good practices and open access tools for institutions around the world to share information on the location and recording of species and specimens. According to GBIF, a total of 107 countries and organisations currently participate in the network, a significant number of which are European.
The GBIF network, as screenshot from https://www.gbif.org/the-gbif-network on 10/06/2025.
By joining GBIF, biodiversity data generated in Bulgaria can be streamlined through the network’s infrastructure so that the country does not need to build and maintain its own separate infrastructure, which also saves significant financial resources.
As a full voting member, Bulgaria will ensure that biodiversity data in the country will be shared and accessible through the platform, and will contribute to global knowledge on biodiversity, respectively to the solutions that will promote its conservation and sustainable use.
Bulgaria’s page on GBIF, as screenshot from https://www.gbif.org/country/BG/summary on 10/06/2025.
Improvements in data management by Bulgaria will also contribute to better reporting and fulfilment of obligations to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as well as to the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). As a member of GBIF, Bulgaria will be able to apply for funding for flagship activities in Bulgarian institutions and neighbouring Balkan countries. This will enable the country to expand its leadership role in the Balkans in biodiversity research and data accumulation.
The partnership between GBIF and Pensoft dates back to 2009 when the global network and the publisher signed their first Memorandum of Understanding intended to solidify their cooperation as leaders in the technological advancement relevant to biodiversity knowledge. Over the next few years, Pensoft integrated its whole biodiversity journal portfolio with the GBIF infrastructure to enable multiple automated workflows, including export of all species occurrence data published in scientific articles straight to the GBIF platform. Most recently, over 20 biodiversity journals powered by Pensoft’s scholarly publishing platform ARPHA launched their own hosted portals on GBIF to make it easier to access and use biodiversity data associated with published research, aligning with principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data.
Content from more than 30 biodiversity journals published on the ARPHA Platform will now be archived in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the world’s largest open-access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives.
A global consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries, BHL digitises and freely shares essential biodiversity materials. A critical resource for researchers, it provides vital access to material that might otherwise be difficult to obtain.
Under the agreement, over 16,000 articles published on Pensoft’s self-developed ARPHA Platform are now available on BHL. Both legacy content and new articles are made available on the platform, complete with full-text PDFs and all relevant metadata.
Thanks to this integration, content in our journals will become even more accessible and readily discoverable, helping researchers find the biodiversity information they need.
Prof. Lyubomir Penev
More content published on ARPHA will gradually be added to the BHL archive.
The publications will be included in the Library’s full-text search, allowing researchers to easily locate relevant biodiversity literature. Crucially, the scientific names within the articles will be indexed using the Global Names Architecture, enabling seamless discovery of information about specific taxa across the BHL collection.
“Pensoft is pleased to collaborate with BHL in our joint mission to support global biodiversity research through free access to knowledge. Thanks to this integration, content in our journals will become even more accessible and readily discoverable, helping researchers find the biodiversity information they need,” said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft and ARPHA.
The news comes soon after BHL announced it is about to face a major shift in its operation. From 2026, the Smithsonian Institution – one of BHL’s 10 founding members – will cease to host the administrative and technical components of BHL. As the consortium explores a range of options, the BHL team is confident that “the transition opens the door to a reimagined and more sustainable future for BHL.”
Collisions between animals and vehicles are a threat to conservation efforts and human safety, and have a massive cost for transport infrastructure managers and users.
Using the opportunities offered by the increasing number of sensors embedded into transport infrastructures and the development of their digital twins, a French research team has developed a method aiming at managing animal-vehicle collisions. The goal is to map the collision risk between trains and ungulates (roe deer and wild boar) by deploying a camera trap network.
Roe deer crossing a railway, photographed by a field sensor and automatically identified with artificial intelligence. Image credit: TerrOïko
The proposed method starts by simulating the most probable movements of animals within and around an infrastructure using an ecological modelling software. This allows the assessment of where they are most likely to cross.
After identifying these collision hotspots, ecological modelling is used again to assist with the design of photo sensor deployment in the field. Various deployment scenarios are modelled to find the one whose predicted results are most consistent with the initial simulation.
Example of a map showing the estimated relative abundance of a species along a railway section. The higher the abundance, the higher the collision risk. Image credit: TerrOïko
Once sensors are deployed, the data collected (in this case, photos) are processed through artificial intelligence (deep learning) to detect and identify species at the infrastructure’s vicinity.
Finally, the processed data are fed into an abundance model, which is another type of ecological model. It is used to estimate the probable density of animals in every part of a studied area using data collected at only a few points in that area. The result is a map showing the relative abundance of species and, therefore, the collision risk along an infrastructure.
This method was implemented on an actual section of railway in south-western France, but it can be applied to any type of transport infrastructure. It may be implemented not only on existing infrastructures but also during the conception phase of new ones (as part of the environmental impact assessment strategy).
Such a method paves the way for the integration of biodiversity-oriented monitoring systems into transport infrastructures and their digital twins. As sensors collect data continuously, it could be improved in the future to provide real-time driver information and produce dynamic adaptive maps that could be ultimately sent to autonomous vehicles.
Original source
Moulherat S, Pautrel L, Debat G, Etienne M-P, Gendron L, Hautière N, Tarel J-P, Testud G, Gimenez O (2024) Biodiversity monitoring with intelligent sensors: An integrated pipeline for mitigating animal-vehicle collisions. In: Papp C-R, Seiler A, Bhardwaj M, François D, Dostál I (Eds) Connecting people, connecting landscapes. Nature Conservation 57: 103-124.https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.57.108950
The article collection highlights the outcomes of the 2022 International Conference of the Infrastructure and Ecology Network Europe (IENE), held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
While the transport sector is vital for societal development, it also poses significant challenges to biodiversity, often fragmenting landscapes and disrupting wildlife movement. The IENE 2022 conference explored solutions to harmonise transport infrastructure with ecological connectivity. More than 190 presentations and workshops at the event advocated for multi-sectoral cooperation and evidence-based solutions.
The special issue comprises research on topics such as:
Wildlife crossings and ecological connectivity
Mitigation strategies for animal-vehicle collisions
Strategic approaches to sustainable infrastructure development
Emerging technologies like AI for biodiversity monitoring
Aerial top down view of ecoduct or wildlife crossing – vegetation covered bridge over a motorway that allows wildlife to safely cross over
A global perspective is considered, with case studies from Europe, North America, and Asia. This special issue is a call to action for policymakers, planners, and conservationists worldwide.
See a full list of the special issue’s articles here:
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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One third of Vietnam’s 329 mammal species are threatened with extinction, according to a recent study published in our open-access journal Nature Conservation.
Conducted by German scientist Hanna Höffner of the University of Cologne and Cologne Zoo, alongside an international team, the research underscores Vietnam’s vital but fragile position as a biodiversity hub within the Indo-Burma Biodiversity Hotspot.
The study reveals that 112 mammal species in Vietnam face extinction, despite most being found in at least one protected area. Some micro-endemic species, such as the Da Lat tube-nosed bat (Murina harpioloides), are particularly vulnerable as they are not present in any protected sites.
Murina harpioloides. Credit: Son Truong Nguyen.Hipposideros alongensis. Credit: Son Truong Nguyen.
Around 40% of the threatened species lack ex situ conservation (zoo conservation breeding) programs, which increases their risk of extinction. Iconic species like the saola (Pseudoryx vuquangensis), the silver-backed chevrotain (Tragulus versicolor), and the large-antlered muntjac (Muntiacus vuquangensis) are among the Critically Endangered taxa at risk.
The study advocates for the IUCN‘s “One Plan Approach” to species conservation, which calls for combining different expertise and integrated in situ and ex situ management strategies. Establishing assurance colonies in zoos and increasing connectivity between isolated protected areas are critical recommendations for safeguarding Vietnam’s unique mammal diversity.
A gaur (Bos gaurus) in Vietnam.
By building up ex situ populations for threatened taxa, zoos can help to literally “buy time” and act as modern arks that can contribute with later releases according to the IUCN’s “Reverse the Red” conservation campaign. Ex situ species holding data by Species360 are now also integrated in the IUCN Red List species’ chapters (a “One Plan” approach to species data).
Ex situ preservation of threatened Vietnamese mammals worldwide.
Vietnam is home to a rich array of mammals, including 36 endemic species and nine micro-endemic taxa. Its primate fauna is particularly noteworthy, with 28 species, the highest number in mainland Southeast Asia. This includes the endemic tonkin snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus avunculus) and Delacour’s langur (Trachypithecus delacouri).
Northern Vietnam and the Annamite Mountain Range are biodiversity hotspots, hosting species such as the Critically Endangered Cao-vit gibbon (Nomascus nasutus), the southern white-cheeked gibbon (Nomascus siki) and the red-shanked douc (Pygathrix nemaeus).
A red-shanked douc (Pygathrix nemaeus).
The study calls for prioritising the “One Plan Approach” to conservation of highly threatened species, reassessing Data Deficient species, and enhancing habitat connectivity.
VIETNAMAZING logo.
The conservation campaign VIETNAMAZING by EAZA (European Association of Zoos and Aquaria) currently highlights Vietnam’s biodiversity treasure and advocates for improved conservation of threatened mammal species.
Original study
Höffner H, Nguyen ST, Dang PH, Motokawa M, Oshida T, Rödder D, Nguyen TQ, Le MD, Bui HT, Ziegler T (2024) Conservation priorities for threatened mammals of Vietnam: Implementation of the IUCN´s One Plan Approach. Nature Conservation 56: 161-180. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.56.128129
As a growing number of species face extinction, both researchers and the general public tend to focus on attractive, well-known and charismatic fauna and flora. But what about the species that have disappeared from scientific recognition altogether?
Research published in our open-access journal Nature Conservation sheds light on how historic taxonomic errors and misinterpretations have led to the disappearance of many species from science’s radar, highlighting the crucial role that taxonomy and natural history collections (NHCs) can play in rediscovering and conserving biodiversity.
Many species that were described long ago have been overlooked due to erroneous synonymisation, a process whereby one species is mistakenly classified under another’s name, generally because of the scarce number of specimens available. These species, the authors now refer to as ‘long-lost synonymised species,’ can fall out of awareness for decades, even centuries.
The 20th century saw a general trend of ‘lumping’ species together, reducing the number of recognised taxa, especially within well-known vertebrate groups. Taxonomic inertia – the persistence of outdated classifications – has caused many species to remain under-recognised, with their conservation statuses too often overlooked. This problem is described among better-known vertebrates, but is also likely present in some of the best studied invertebrates.
The importance of natural history collections
More than simply relics of the past, natural history collections provide a contemporary and essential resource for taxonomists working to untangle these historical errors. Museum specimens allow scientists to re-examine old classifications, using modern tools and methods to correct mistakes and uncover new taxa. Recent advances in ‘museomics’ – the study of genetic material from museum specimens – have opened new possibilities for species identification and conservation.
Leopardus geoffroyi. Credit: diegocarau via iNaturalist.
Such breakthroughs have led to the revalidation of the Neotropical genus Leopardus and the African wolf, Canis anthus, which had been synonymised for decades. Without natural history collections and the associated holotypes, the nomenclature of these species might have remained obscured, and their conservation needs unmet or delayed.
Natural History Collections and Museomics
Pensoft recently launched a new journal titled Natural History Collections and Museomics(NHCM).The publication comes at a pivotal moment in which taxonomists face the challenges of dwindling resources and fewer scientists entering the field. Through the publication of important open-access research, the journal aims to play a crucial role in bridging the gap between traditional taxonomy and modern conservation efforts.
Furthermore, by highlighting the essential role of taxonomy and natural history collections, NHCM will support the rediscovery of species long lost to science and help to conserve the world’s forgotten biodiversity. As the field of museomics grows, so too does the hope of rediscovering species that have been hidden in plain sight. The new journal already benefits from a competent and varied editorial board, including two of the authors of the Nature Conservation paper, Franco Andreone and Spartaco Gippoliti.
If the scientific community rally behind taxonomy and natural history collections, ensuring these vital tools are integrated into future biodiversity assessments, we can hope to preserve not just the species we know, but those we have forgotten.
Original source:
Gippoliti S, Farina S, Andreone F (2024) Lost species, neglected taxonomy, and the role of natural history collections and synonymization in the identification of the World’s forgotten biodiversity. Nature Conservation 56: 119-126. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.56.132036
At the 5th ESP Europe conference in Wageningen, Pensoft will lead a training session on effective science communication through open access publishing.
The Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP) is a global network that connects ecosystem services scientists, practitioners, stakeholders, and policymakers at local, national, regional, and global scales. ESP enhances and encourages a diversity of approaches, while reducing unnecessary duplication of effort in the development of concepts and application of ecosystem services.
Starting in 2008, ESP organises annual international conferences, where experts share research progress and exchange ideas in the field of ecosystem services, strengthening cooperation among scientists and practitioners. Since 2015, global and regional conferences started taking place bi-annually, with the 5th ESP Europe conference taking place this year between 18 and 22 November in Wageningen, The Netherlands, under the theme ‘Ecosystem Services: One Planet, One Health’.
The ESP Europe conference will focus on the question of how the ecosystem services concept can address the challenges involved in delivering the global vision of One Health. It will also highlight the interdependence of health across various domains – human, animal, plant, and ecosystem health, and the health of the global environment.
In addition to the main event, the organisers are providing access to pre-conference trainings on Sunday, 17 November, one day before the official start of the conference. One of these focuses on science communication and its role in enhancing research impact. Titled “Innovative tools for science communication: How to increase your research impact”, this session will be hosted by Pensoft Publishers.
A communication and dissemination leader in a wide range of EU research projects, as well as an independent publishing company, Pensoft will introduce the participants to best practices in science communication, drawing examples from a project portfolio which covers ecosystems and biodiversity, agriculture and forestry, pollinators and more. This training activity will also highlight the integral role of open science in effective dissemination, showcasing the opportunities facilitated by Pensoft’s open-access journals, which promoting transparency, accessibility, and reusability of results. Overall, the session will provide an in-depth look into the interlinkage between effectively communicated research outputs and the benefits of openly published data.
The Pensoft team will share their experiences with projects such as SELINA and SpongeBoost, both of which will also be presented in the scientific sessions and via a shared booth at the event.
Everyone who has already registered for the official programme can still add a training to their application using this link.
