Held from 22-26 June 2026, the symposium brought together researchers working across the full spectrum of the field, from Earth Observation and vegetation databases to plant community interactions, seed regeneration, and long-term vegetation dynamics. From opening keynotes to the closing ceremony, the energy, curiosity, and collegiality of our community made this one for the books.
A Packed Scientific Programme
The opening ceremony of the 68th IAVS Annual Symposium.
Pensoft’s stand at the 68th Annual Symposium.
Pensoft’s stand at the 68th IAVS Annual Symposium.
Alongside the core symposium topics, this year’s programme featured seven special sessions on some of the field’s most pressing questions, including bringing different vegetation classification approaches together, plant biogeography and macroecology, scaling laws in vegetation ecology, belowground functional ecology and more.
Moreover, the session themed “Bringing the different vegetation classification approaches together”, sponsored by the IAVS Vegetation Classification Working Group, will be used as a basis for assembling a Special Collection in the open-access journal Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS).
Two of VCS’ Editors-in-Chief also took the stage this year: Prof. Jürgen Dengler shared a presentation called “Plant invasions in grasslands of Switzerland: invaders, spatial patterns and effects on biodiversity”.
While Dr. Idoia Biurrun presented “The power of scale: uncovering biodiversity patterns and environmental drivers in riparian forests”.
Spotlight On Our Vegetation Science Journals
Speaking of that journal, we’ve been proud collaborators with IAVS since 2020, when we launched Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) together as the association’s newest journal. At this year’s symposium, we had the chance to showcase both VCS and our other flagship vegetation title, Vegetation Ecology and Diversity (VED), to the community.
Vegetation Classification and Survey promotional materials from the 68th IAVS Annual Symposium.
Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) is an international, peer-reviewed, online journal on plant community ecology, published on behalf of IAVS. It is devoted to vegetation survey and classification at any organisational and spatial scale, welcoming original papers that develop new vegetation typologies as well as applied studies, from vegetation mapping and ecosystem modelling to nature conservation and land-use management.
Five years after launch, VCS is boasting a2025 Scopus CiteScore of 4.7(up from 3.6 the year before), and the journal is now ranked Q1 across all the categories in which it is indexed.
Vegetation Ecology and Diversity promotional materials from the 68th IAVS Annual Symposium.
Vegetation Ecology and Diversity (VED) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal owned by the Italian Society of Vegetation Science (SISV). It publishes original research covering all aspects of vegetation, from plant communities to landscapes, with a particular focus on plant community ecology and vegetation surveys used to advance ecological models, classify vegetation, map ecosystems, and monitor and conserve European habitats.
A Productive Conversation About VCS’s Future
Pensoft’s team presenting during the Editorial Meeting at the 68th IAVS Annual Symposium.
Editorial meeting at the 68th IAVS Symposium.
Editorial Meeting at IAVS 2026.
For Pensoft, one of the standout moments of the symposium was the VCS editorial meeting, where we had the chance to sit down with members of the journal’s editorial board for a candid and productive discussion about Vegetation Classification and Survey‘s current position and its prospects for future growth. It was a valuable opportunity to hear directly from the people shaping the journal’s direction and to plan the next steps together.
Pensoft’s Head of Marketing, Sales and Events with Susan WiserP resident of IAVS during the 68th Annual Symposium.
During the symposium, Pensoft’s stand was visited by Susan Wiser, President of IAVS, giving our on-site team the chance to discuss our ongoing publishing collaboration.
Celebrating The Next Generation Of Vegetation Scientists
Celia González-López receiving the Young Scientist Award at the 68th IAVS Annual Symposium.
Оne of the many highlights that week was seeing the Young Scientist Award go to Celia González-López, recognising her outstanding early-career contributions to the field. Curiously, González-López is among the co-authors of a recent paper in Natural History Collections and Museomics, describing a workflow for creating 3D-printed insect replicas to make museum collections more accessible for education and outreach.
Looking Ahead
Group photo at the end of the conference. Credit to IAVS.
It was a great pleasure to become part of the IAVS community, and we look forward to an even stronger collaboration and many productive achievements together in the years to come.
Save the date: the 69th IAVS Annual Symposium will be held in Kumasi, Ashanti Region, Ghana, from 12-16 July 2027.
You can follow Pensoft on Bluesky, Facebook, X and LinkedIn to keep up all the latest updates and the events we are attending.
Pensoft participated in this year’s 9th European Conference on Tropical Ecology (ECTE 2026) and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Society for Tropical Ecology (gtö).
Under the theme ‘Species-Ecosystems-People,’ the conference offered a multidisciplinary perspective through 175 oral presentations and 42 posters across 17 thematic sessions, bridging the gap between fundamental ecological research and the sustainable restoration of vital ecosystems.
From the very first day and throughout the week, the Pensoft booth was buzzing with people and activities. Attendees had the chance to explore our diverse portfolio of journals, many of which align seamlessly with the ‘Species-Ecosystems-People’ theme, including:
Editors of existing or yet-to-be-launched Diamond and Gold Open Access journals were also invited to visit the Pensoft stand to learn more about the process and benefits of migrating to or launching a journal on the ARPHA Platform.
Developed by Pensoft to power its own well-renowned scientific journals, ARPHA is now a globally recognised end-to-end solution for innovative, technologically advanced scientific publishing that comes with multiple in-house human-provided services.
Beyond browsing journals and discussing publishing opportunities, visitors engaged with our interactive “Pin Your Favourite Species” board and took promotional materials and stickers featuring the stunning artwork of Pensoft’s in-house scientific illustrator Denitsa Peneva, which proved to be a major visual draw.
A milestone partnership
Dr. Katarina Sam, president of the Society for Tropical Ecology (gtö) at Pensoft’s booth.
On 24th of February, Dr. Katerina Sam (gtö) signed the partnership. This MoU aims to promote research activities and optimise the dissemination of scientific knowledge within the tropical ecology community to ensure that important research findings reach a global audience through robust publication support.
One major highlight of this year’s conference was the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Society for Tropical Ecology (gtö) and Pensoft during the general assembly.
Keynote speakers
Our team on-site was delighted to meet several Pensoft authors who took the stage as keynote speakers to share their expertise.
On February 24th, Prof. Alexandre Antonelli of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew delivered a compelling lecture on “Illuminating Biodiversity Darkspots,” reminding us that over 90% of fungi remain unknown and 45% of plants are at risk of extinction.
Prof. Antonelli during his keynote talk at ECTE 2026.
Prof. Antonelli during his keynote talk at ECTE 2026.
That same day, Dr. Maria Fungomeli of the National Museums of Kenya presented her keynote on “Biodiversity Patterns in the Kenyan Coastal Forests,” highlighting the vital links between coastal ecosystems, culture, and community.
A valued author and reviewer for VCS, Dr. Fungomeli has also contributed to several journals powered by ARPHA Platform, including Pensoft’s Biodiversity Data Journal and ZooKeys, as well as Senckenberg’s Contributions to Entomology.
Dr. Fungomeli during her keynote talk.
Dr. Fungomeli at Pensoft’s booth.
On February 25th, Prof. Rob Marchant of the University of York, an author in our open-access journal African Invertebrates, delivered his talk, “Embedding the Past for Balanced Future Tropical Mountain Social Ecological Systems.”
He explored how shifts in human-nature interactions over the last 6,000 years can help researchers understand the complex transitions from original forest extents to our modern landscapes. See Prof. Marchant’s paper in African Invertebrates here.
Her presentation, “Aromatic delight: Revealing diversity and function of fruit microbiome in seed dispersal,” proposed a fascinating shift in ecological understanding.
During her talk, she suggested the potential that microbes co-evolved with animals and plants to support scent-driven seed dispersal effectively transforming a traditional bipartite interaction (plant-animal seed dispersal) into a tripartite one.
Dr. Chronopoulou received a waiver for a free publication in any open-access journal within the Pensoft portfolio.
After a fantastic week in Passau at ECTE 2026, Pensoft is now looking forward to the 10th European Conference on Tropical Ecology, which will take place in Aarhus, Denmark. There, Pensoft plans to establish further partnerships and continue its support for open science in insect research. See you there!
Berlin (Germany) and Sofia (Bulgaria), 10th February, 2026 – ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and Pensoft Publishers, an independent open access publisher and provider of high-quality scholarly publishing services, today announced an expansion of their Journal Home partnership. Building on an earlier collaboration announced in 2023, the list now expands to 40 journals, covering the majority of Pensoft’s and partners’ journals using the publisher’s ARPHA Publishing Platform.
With most of Pensoft’s eligible partner journals choosing to participate, the expansion reflects strong demand for greater exposure and engagement opportunities, particularly among smaller and developing journals in niche research areas. Through Journal Home, partner publishers can reach more relevant audiences, improve discoverability, and connect more effectively with researchers worldwide.
Participating Pensoft journals will also benefit from:
Increased usage and readership, with full-text open access journal content seamlessly surfaced to highly relevant researcher communities across the ResearchGate platform.
Stronger engagement from new and returning authors, connecting partner journals, including specialist and emerging titles, with targeted researchers and potential authors throughout the research lifecycle.
Dedicated Journal Profiles and prominent placement of Pensoft journals to enhance visibility and branding, boosting recognition of partner journals with researcher communities around the world.
Improved author experience, with the automatic addition of published articles to author profiles, clearer insight into reader engagement, and greater opportunities for meaningful collaboration.
“Journal Home allows us to provide our partner journals with improved visibility and stronger connections with global researcher communities. Many of these journals serve highly specialised fields, and Journal Home helps make sure their articles reach the right researchers, who will benefit from them most.”
Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft Publishers
“We’re pleased to expand our Journal Home partnership with Pensoft to support an increasing number of partner journals. By bringing these journals onto the platform, smaller and emerging titles can expand their reach, attract high-quality submissions, and connect with the most relevant researcher communities at key moments in their research journey.”
Robyn Mugridge, Head of Partnership Development at ResearchGate
For more information about Pensoft Publishers, please visit www.pensoft.net.
About ResearchGate
ResearchGate is the professional network for researchers. Over 25 million researchers use researchgate.net to share and discover research, build their networks, and advance their careers. Based in Berlin, ResearchGate was founded in 2008. Its mission is to connect the world of science and make research open to all.
About Pensoft Publishers
Pensoft is an independent, open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider, best known for its 40+ biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, One Ecosystem, and Metabarcoding and Metagenomics. Ever since becoming the first to introduce semantic enrichments and hyperlinks within a scientific article in the field of biodiversity in 2010, Pensoft has been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.
The agreement encompasses five key research and medical bodies, and allows corresponding authors to publish their findings without individual Article Processing Charges.
Pensoft and the University of Zurichhave signed a comprehensive Open Access (OA) agreement, starting a partnership that enables researchers at participating institutions to publish their findings in Pensoft’s peer-reviewed journals without incurring individual Article Processing Charges (APCs).
Under this new framework, publishing costs for corresponding authors affiliated with the respective institutions are 100% covered by a centralised institutional deposit secured by the University of Zurich. By removing financial barriers, the agreement encourages scientists to disseminate their work to both the academic community and the wider public, making research immediately and freely available upon publication.
This initiative ensures that research is shared under open licences in strict accordance with the FAIR principles—making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
“We are excited to start this partnership with the University of Zurich and sign an agreement that reflects our strong commitment to inclusive and equitable open science. By supporting researcher-driven publishing, we continue to foster a sustainable environment for high-impact scientific communication.”
Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO of Pensoft
“We are pleased to extend our portfolio of gold open access journals, in which our researchers can publish their findings without paying individual APCs. We thereby strengthen our commitment to open research information.”
University Library Zurich
Are you affiliated with a research institution operating with OA agreements? Is your institution interested in helping resident researchers navigate the complex processes underpinning academic publishing and knowledge sharing? Reach out to <publishing@pensoft.net> to discuss a potential collaboration.
From fieldwork to first publication in the journal Vegetation Classification Survey, Lina Rinne reflects on her research in Lemnos, Greece. Alongside Erwin Bergmeier and Stefan Meyer, she tracks her path from a 2024 field trip to a 2025 publication, exploring the island’s unique agro-ecosystems.
I was introduced to the island of Lemnos during a university field trip in 2024, while I was still a master’s student. At the time, I admittedly questioned Erwin’s and Stefan’s choice of destination—why not go to a “cool” island like Crete? However, now, after two visits to Lemnos, I have to say that this island is very special. As my very first scientific publication focuses on this island—and was selected as an Editors’ Choice paper in the last quarter of 2025—Lemnos will always have a place in my heart.
The path to that publication was anything but straightforward. Fortunately, my supervisors and co-authors, Erwin and Stefan, supported me throughout the entire process.
Erwin Bergmeier and Stefan Meyer are well known to researchers working on arable plant diversity, whether in Greece, Germany, or beyond. They have been involved in numerous projects, and only a few people know arable fields, their plant species, and communities better than they do.
Their work on Lemnos began in 2018 as part of the Terra Lemnia project , a local initiative established by the Mediterranean Institute for Nature and Anthropos (MedINA). The project aims to understand and preserve the island’s arable plant diversity and to support farmers to maintain the less intensive, “traditional” agriculture on the island.
Barley field with a rich diversity of arable plants, among others Papaver rhoeas, Rapistrum rugosum, Glebionis segetum, and Agrostemma githago, Lemnos, May 2025. The harsh volcanic landscape of the Fakos peninsula is visible in the background (photo credit: Lina Rinne)
On Lemnos, most agricultural fields are used to grow rain-fed fodder crops for sheep and goats. As they are mainly interested in biomass, eradicating wild arable plants (“weeds”) would be more costly than simply tolerating them. This farming reality has allowed an exceptionally high diversity of arable plants to persist—a central focus of our study.
During the master’s field trip in spring 2024, Erwin and Stefan introduced us to the island, the Terra Lemnia project, and local farmers. We explored a wide range of landscapes and attractions: the medieval castle overlooking the island’s capital Myrina, the wetlands and salt lakes in eastern Lemnos, the Ammothínes—striking inland sand dunes resembling a small desert—and Poliochni, often referred to as the “oldest city in Europe”.
At the time, arable plants played only a minor role in my perception, and I certainly did not expect that my academic journey would soon lead me back to Lemnos—and specifically to its agricultural fields.
That changed when I started my PhD in July 2024 with a research focus on Greek agro-ecosystems. We decided to use Lemnos as the basis for my first publication, contributing to the VCS Special Collection“Vegetation classification of islands and archipelagos”. Given my familiarity with the island and the extensive vegetation survey data collected by Erwin and Stefan over several years, it was the perfect starting point.
In January 2025, Erwin and Stefan handed me their dataset, wished me “good luck,” and I began working through the data in R. It was a learning process in every sense. Many species were unfamiliar to me, and even online resources did not always provide clear answers. Gradually, however, my understanding of the data—and of the community patterns it contained—improved. This was greatly helped by accompanying Erwin and Stefan during their fieldwork on Lesvos and Lemnos in spring 2025.
Standing in the agricultural fields and seeing species I had previously known only from spreadsheets and photographs brought the data to life. It also reinforced just how unusual Lemnos is from a Central European perspective. Many people of my generation grew up surrounded by heavily managed and sprayed fields, where a single red poppy is a photo-worthy sight.
In contrast, the cereal and pulse fields of Lemnos are colorful: yellow Brassicaceae grow alongside seas of red poppies, the pink flowers of Agrostemma githago (which is basically eradicated in Germany), and so many Trifolium species that it was difficult to keep track of them all.
Erwin Bergmeier conducting a vegetation survey on a rotational fallow dominated by Anchusa hybrida in front of a small Greek chapel on Lemnos, May 2025 (photo credit: Lina Rinne)
During our fieldwork, I learned a lot from Erwin and Stefan. We sampled additional fields for our study, and Erwin pointed out the soil differences (from sandy to loamy) that translated into the vegetation patterns revealed in the data analysis. I also took many pictures and notes to remember the fields and the species.
Fieldwork in Greece, of course, also comes with its own rewards: bathing in hot springs or the Mediterranean Sea, enjoying local dishes grown on the very fields we studied, encountering rare and fascinating bird species (including flamingos!), and meeting local colleagues and friends. Some of them joined us during fieldwork or helped us talk to local farmers, which provided valuable insight into agricultural management practices on the island and their socio-ecological context.
Back in Germany, it was time for a major overhaul of the analyses and manuscript. I incorporated what I had learned during fieldwork, and together with my co-authors, we integrated their extensive knowledge of Lemnos’ agro-ecosystems and arable plant communities.
By May, the writing and revision process was in full swing. Drafting, discussing, revising, and finalizing figures and tables continued until July, when we finally submitted the manuscript to Vegetation Classification and Survey.
As my first publication, the peer-review and production process has been a steep learning experience, involving multiple rounds of revisions and corrections. In the end, however, it was immensely rewarding.
We are very happy to have drawn attention to this remarkable island and to the often-overlooked topic of arable plant biodiversity. Lemnos is well worth visiting in spring (or any other season)—whether for its colorful fields, the diversity of migrating birds, unique landscapes, historical landmarks, or great food. Just be prepared for strong winds and surprisingly cold temperatures; at times, I wore nearly all my clothes at once to stay warm.
Original source:
Rinne, L., Meyer, S. and Bergmeier, E. (2025). Soil and season shape less intensively managed agro-ecosystems of a Mediterranean island—Insights from Lemnos (Greece). Vegetation Classification and Survey, 6, pp.253–271. doi: https://doi.org/10.3897/vcs.164437
Vegetation classification is complex and often subjective, shaped by diverse perspectives. The 4th EDGG Field Workshop in Sicily underscored these challenges, highlighting the need for collaborative observation and the ongoing refinement of ecological definitions in an ever-changing landscape.
Long before any field workshop, before any grant application and academic unfairness, before any politely worded review that praises the dataset while questioning the premises, there was a man standing on a slope of sunburnt clay, wondering whether vegetation really wished to be classified at all.
That man knew (though he rarely said it aloud) that vegetation classification is an act of faith disguised as method. Like all faiths, it requires ritual (the plot, the relevé, the cover estimate), a shared language (alliances, orders, classes), officiants (distinguished professors), and a community small enough to agree without ever fully agreeing. He also knew, with a lucidity bordering on pessimism, that this faith is always betrayed by arithmetic: too few observers, too many species, too much heterogeneity compressed into too small a square of ground. Even if Sicily was overrun by phytosociologists, the resulting map would still be a pale approximation of what the vegetation actually is: a shimmering, restless negotiation among climate, soil, disturbance, chance, and time. These ideas would later harden into equations and arguments, written with some disenchantment in a paper about classification efficiency and sustainable compromise (Guarino et al., 2022).
Careful sampling of a nested plot in a dry grassland in western Sicily during the EDGG Field Workshop 2012. Photo credit: Thomas Becker, 2012
But in 2012, there was still considerable unease. Unease, however, can be productive. Schopenhauer would have called it the friction between Will and Representation; Calvino might have imagined it as a labyrinth of syntaxonomic schemes; a vegetation ecologist would simply recognize it as the moment when field reality refuses to align with inherited categories. In Sicily, this moment occurs often. Annuals and perennials intertwine like disputing narratives. Communities appear discrete in full summer, when annuals almost disappear, and blur by the next spring. The same slope, revisited a year later, tells a different story with the same protagonists.
It was from this discomfort – and not despite it – that the idea emerged to invite outsiders. Not reviewers, not authorities, but colleagues shaped by different landscapes and different traditions: Central and Northern European vegetation ecologists accustomed to recording every detectable species within a plot, mosses and lichens included, trusting that completeness might tame ambiguity. Bringing them to Sicily was an experiment in epistemology: what would Mediterranean vegetation look like through Central European eyes?
Would the preconceptual separation into separate sampling units, Lygeo-Stipetea versus Stipo-Trachynietea, Ammophilion versus Alkanno-Maresion nanae, survive such scrutiny? Or would they collapse into something less Manichean, but perhaps more honest?
Thus, the fourth EDGG Field Workshop was organized, quietly radical in its intent (Guarino et al. 2012). The island became a laboratory of perspectives. On coastal sands, inland clays, volcanic substrates, and evaporitic hills, small squares of ground were subjected to a level of attention usually reserved for more anthropocentric (eco?) systems. Every terricolous autotrophic organism was invited to the census. The plots filled with names, then with doubts, then with discussions that were sometimes technical, sometimes philosophical, in a distinctly Pirandellian sense: Which community is this? And who am I to decide?
Searching for a suitable place for a nested plot in dry grasslands on the eastern flank of Mt. Etna (Sant’Alfio) at 1200 m a.s.l. Photo credit: Iwona Dembicz, 2012
The reader knows how this story ends, because it has already been written several times. The analyses would show higher diversity than expected, blurred boundaries where syntaxonomical schemes promised clarity, and clusters that made ecological sense without offering metaphysical comfort. The separation between annual and perennial grasslands, so carefully defended in Mediterranean sampling tradition, would refuse to emerge cleanly when confronted with comprehensive data. The resulting paper, gestated over years of reflection and discussion, would eventually articulate these tensions with composure (hopefully…), acknowledging both the power and the limits of any classification.
And yet, the true outcome of the 4th EDGG Field Workshop was not a dendrogram or a table of diagnostic species. It was the confirmation of a long-harboured suspicion: that objectivity in vegetation science is not a destination, but a direction. One walks toward it, knowing it will never be reached, much like the horizon across Sicilian hills. The value lies in the walking, in the shared protocols, the disagreements conducted in good faith, and the willingness to see one’s own landscape through new eyes.
From the outside, the decision to organize an international field workshop might appear strategic, even confident. In truth, it is an existential gesture: a way of saying that if classification is inevitably subjective, then the only ethical response is to multiply viewpoints; if approximation is unavoidable, then one must at least approximate together.
Vegetation, after all, does not care how it is classified. But vegetation ecologists do. And in that caring, temporally limited, often contested, and persistently unfinished, lies both the burden and the dignity of their work.
In spring, there was still a bit of snow on Mt. Etna, giving the team of the 4th EDGG Field Workshop the chance to present themselves in front of the EDGG logo carved in the snow. Photo credit: Thomas Becker, 2012
Original study:
Guarino, R., Becker, T., Iwona Dembicz, Dolnik, C., Kozub, Ł. and Dengler, J. (2025). Dry grasslands of Sicily: Multi-taxon diversity and classification challenges. Vegetation Classification and Survey, 6, pp.301–327. doi: https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.175402
If you wish to know how the author team, 13 years after the field sampling, combined their contrasting viewpoints into a joint perspective, please visit our paper (Guarino et al. 2025). If you are interested in the EDGG Field Workshops, you can find information on the EDGG webpage at https://edgg.org/fw/overview. More details about sampling methodology are available in Dengler et al. (2016). To understand how the Field Workshops in general contribute to the understanding of the diversity patterns of Palaearctic open habitats, you might visit the GrassPlot Diversity Explorer (https://edgg.org/databases/GrasslandDiversityExplorer; see also Biurrun et al. 2021). There have been 21 EDGG Field Workshops since the first event in Transylvania in 2009 (Dengler et al. 2012). They often give rise to influential papers on biodiversity patterns (e.g., Turtureanu et al. 2014; Cancellieri et al. 2024) and syntaxonomy (e.g., García-Mijangos et al. 2021; Vynokurov et al. 2024). In 2025, there were two great Field Workshops, one in the Maritime and Ligurian Alps of Italy and one in the Turku Archipelago of Finland (Miskova et al. 2025). In 2026, there will again be one or two Field Workshops, one in conjunction with the Eurasian Grassland Conference in Bulgaria (Vynokurov et al. 2025), the second still to be discussed. If you are interested in more details, please consult the webpage or contact Jürgen Dengler, the Deputy Field Workshop Coordinator.
References:
Biurrun, I., Pielech, R., Dembicz, I., Gillet, F., Kozub, L., Marcenò, C., Reitalu, T., Van Meerbeek, K., Guarino, R., (…) & Dengler, J. (2021) Benchmarking plant diversity of Palaearctic grasslands and other open habitats. Journal of Vegetation Science 32: e13050. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13050
Cancellieri, L., Sperandii, M.G., Rosati, L., Bellisario, B., Franceschini, C., Aleffi, M., Bartolucci, F., Becker, T., Belonovskaya, E., (…) & Filibeck, G. (2024) Drivers of vascular plant, bryophyte and lichen richness in grasslands along a precipitation gradient (central Apennines, Italy). Journal of Vegetation Science 35: e13305. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13305
Dengler, J., Becker, T., Ruprecht, E., Szabó, A., Becker, U., Beldean, M., Bita-Nicolae, C., Dolnik, C., Goia, I., (…) & Uğurlu, E. (2012): Festuco-Brometea communities of the Transylvanian Plateau (Romania) – a preliminary overview on syntaxonomy, ecology, and biodiversity. Tuexenia 32: 319–359.
Dengler, J., Boch, S., Filibeck, G., Chiarucci, A., Dembicz, I., Guarino, R., Henneberg, B., Janišová, M., Marcenò, C., (…) & Biurrun, I. 2016. Assessing plant diversity and composition in grasslands across spatial scales: the standardised EDGG sampling methodology. Bulletin of the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group 32: 13−30.
García-Mijangos, I., Berastegi, A., Biurrun, I., Dembicz, I., Janišová, M., Kuzemko, A., Vynokurov, D., Ambarlı, D., Etayo, J., (…) & Dengler, J. (2021) Grasslands of Navarre (Spain), focusing on the Festuco-Brometea: classification, hierarchical expert system and characterisation. Vegetation Classification and Survey 2: 195–231.
Guarino, R., Becker, T., Dembicz, I., Dolnik, C., Kącki, Z., Kozub, Ł., Rejžek, M., Dengler, J. (2012) Impressions from the 4th EDGG Research Expedition to Sicily: community composition and diversity of Mediterranean grasslands. Bulletin of the European Dry Grassland Group 15: 12–22.
Guarino, R., Guccione, M., Gillet, F. (2022) Plant communities, synusiae and the arithmetic of a sustainable classification. Vegetation Classification and Survey 3: 7–13. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.60951
Guarino, R., Becker, T., Dembicz, I., Dolnik, C., Kozub, Ł., Dengler, J. (2025) Dry grasslands of Sicily: Multi-taxon diversity and classification challenges. Vegetation Classification and Survey 6: 301−327. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.175402
Miskova, O., Borovyk, D., Dengler, J., Fahs, N., Mussaari, M., Nikolei, R., Rabyk, I., Skobel, N., Tyshchenko, O., Vynokurov, D. (2025) Diversity of grasslands and other open habitats in the Turku Archipelago, Finland: Impressions from the 21st EDGG Field Workshop, 28 June to 6 July 2025. Palaearctic Grasslands 65: 36-51. https://doi.org/10.21570/EDGG.PG.65.36-51
Turtureanu, P.D., Todorova, S., Becker, T., Dolnik, C., Ruprecht, E., Sutcliffe, L.M.E., Szabó, A. & Dengler, J. 2014. Scale- and taxon-dependent biodiversity patterns of dry grassland vegetation in Transylvania (Romania). Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 182: 15–24.
Vynokurov, D., Aleksanyan, A., Becker, T., Biurrun, I. Borovyk, D., Fayvush, G., García-Mijangos, I., Magnes, M., Palpurina, S., (…) & Dengler, J. (2024) Dry grasslands and thorn-cushion communities of Armenia: a first syntaxonomic classification. Vegetation Classification and Survey 5: 39–73. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.119253
Vynokurov, D., Dengler, J., Vassilev, K., Velev, N. (2025) Announcement of the 22nd EDGG Field Workshop – Pirin Mountains, Bulgaria, 14-18 July 2026. Palaearctic Grasslands 65: 14-15.
Mean ecological indicator values (EIVs) are widely used by vegetation ecologists throughout Europe. They allow for an efficient assessment of site conditions (bioindication) of vegetation plots when measurements of the physical, chemical or land use conditions would be too costly or time-consuming or not possible at all, for example, for the millions of legacy data.
The principle of EIVs was independently invented by Heinz Ellenberg in Germany and L.G. Ramensky in Russia. Due to their high utility, to date, more than 30 EIV systems have been published in Europe, largely varying in indicators, definitions, scaling and plant nomenclature, thus impeding pan-European studies. To overcome these impediments, in early 2023, within a few days, two EIV systems were published for Europe: the Ellenberg-type indicator values by Tichý et al. (2023) and the Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) 1.0 by Dengler et al. (2023). The new systems seem to match an urgent need, as both papers are within the top 1% most cited papers of the year 2023 according to the Scopus database.
Four different weighting approaches in comparison. No cover weighting (i.e. either presence-absence or inverse niche-width weighting) gave significantly better results than cover weighting, while square-root cover weighting was intermediate (from the paper)
With 14,835 valid taxa, EIVE is more comprehensive than Tichý et al. (2023) with 8,679 valid taxa, and it also has a larger spatial coverage (for a brief comparison of both systems, see https://vegsciblog.org/2023/01/21/eive-1-0/). Other than that, it was largely unknown which of the two systems performs better and how their performance relates to the performance of regional EIV systems. Only Dengler et al. (2023) contained correlations of species temperature indicators with GBIF-derived temperature niches, which indicated that EIVE performs slightly better than Tichý et al. (2023) and clearly better than most of the regional EIV systems.
While comparing different EIV systems became relevant only recently, the question of how to compute mean EIVs from the species’ EIVs was unresolved for ages. Both cover-weighted and unweighted means are widespread in the literature but without clear arguments, let alone empirical support for one of the solutions (see the review by Diekmann 2003). One could also think of an intermediate solution like square-root cover weighting. Recently, Hájek et al. (2020) proposed inverse niche-width weighting and found that, in certain scenarios, it outperforms other weighting approaches.
In this study, we used three regional datasets of vegetation plots combined with in-situ measured pH values and near-surface annual temperatures, respectively. We used the two European EIV systems (Dengler et al. 2023; Tichý et al. 2023) and the two regional EIV systems applicable for the Swiss Alps (Ellenberg et al. 1991; Landolt et al. 2010). We combined them with four different weighting approaches, namely unweighted (presence), square-root cover weighted, cover weighted and inverse niche-width weighted, the latter only being applicable to “EIVE” and “Landolt”. The performance of the different combinations was assessed via Pearson’s correlation coefficients (r) between mean EIV values and actual site conditions.
The three-national Master Summer School “Biodiversity Monitoring” 2023 in the Swiss regional nature park “Ela” (Photo: Jürgen Dengler)
The first important observation was that – after taxonomic matching – only EIVE contained all valid taxa of the study, whether they were subspecies, species or aggregates, while the three other systems missed a significant number of valid taxa, either completely or by presenting them only at a higher or lower taxonomic level. In the latter cases, an approximative manual assignment would be, of course, possible, but it comes with additional work and arbitrariness. Moreover, while EIVE provides indicator values for all included taxa, just with different niche widths, the other three systems consider many taxa as indifferent and thus do not rate them. These aspects combined meant that dependent on the EIV system and the indicator, the three systems other than EIVE could not use between 12% and 40% of all occurring taxa for the calculation of mean indicator values.
When it comes to predicting site conditions, expectedly all four EIV systems can do that with only moderate differences in mean r values. However, when calculated with EIVE, the correlations were significantly better than when using “Tichý”. By contrast, “Ellenberg” and “Landolt” did not differ significantly from EIVE. Considering the weighting approach, no weighting performed significantly better than cover weighting, while square-root cover weighting was intermediate. In those two EIVE systems that provide niche-width information, no weighting and inverse niche-width weighting were equally good.
Some of the authors sampling a vegetation plot during the Summer School in an subalpine grassland (Photo: Jürgen Dengler)
Our partly unexpected results might be explained by the “wisdom of the crowd” principle, according to which estimates averaged over several independent sources give better results than the assessment by a single good expert (Galton 1907; Surowiecki 2004). Accordingly, EIVE values based on 31 EIV systems should be better than Ellenberg-type indicator values, which are based on 12 EIV systems. Likewise, applying no cover-weighting means that effectively more taxa enter into the mean EIV value.
For the practice of vegetation ecologists in Europe, our study suggests that one should definitely not use full cover-weighting. EIVE or well-established regional EIV systems can be used, but the system of Tichý et al. (2023) is less advisable. Evidently, our study was based on three relatively small samples collected in the very centre of Europe and only for two indicators. It would be important to conduct similar “calibration” studies also in other parts of Europe (or across the entire continent) and for the other indicators. Finally, it is worth mentioning that currently the preparation of EIVE 1.5 is in the final stages, which will contain more than 20,000 valid taxa.
Measuring soil pH in front of the Sonnenhof in Preda, where the Summer School took place (Photo: Jürgen Dengler)
The idea for this paper originated from the initial work on a project conducted as part of the Swiss-Polish-Ukrainian Master Summer School “Biodiversity Monitoring” in Switzerland, during which students could learn about the vegetation ecology of alpine habitats, improve their understanding of statistical concepts, and admire the undeniable beauty of the Swiss Alps. During the 10 days spent in Preda, Switzerland, we sampled vegetation plots and analysed soil pH, which, together with data from previous conductances of the class, laid the foundation for this paper. Despite the relative lack of experience, working under proper supervision and applying newly acquired skills from the Summer School helped further develop this idea and turn it into a proper scientific article.
The statistical principle of the “wisdom of the crowd” suggests that a larger group of people can collectively make better decisions than a smaller one of a few experts. Involving as many researchers as possible in the scientific process, even inexperienced students or young researchers, can help to innovate and create new solutions.
Original study
Ostrowski G, Aicher S, Mankiewicz A, Chusova O, Dembicz I, Widmer S, Dengler J (2025) Mean ecological indicator values: use EIVE but no cover-weighting. Vegetation Classification and Survey 6: 57-67. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.134800
References:
Dengler J, Jansen F, Chusova O, Hüllbusch E, Nobis MP, Van Meerbeek K, Axmanová I, Bruun HH, Chytrý M, … Gillet F (2023) Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) 1.0. Vegetation Classification and Survey 4: 7–29. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.98324; see also https://vegsciblog.org/2023/01/21/eive-1-0/
Diekmann M (2003) Species indicator values as an important tool in applied plant ecology – a review. Basic and Applied Ecology 4: 493–506.
Ellenberg H, Weber HE, Düll R, Wirth V, Werner W, Paulißen D (1991) Zeigerwerte von Pflanzen in Mitteleuropa. Scripta Geobotanica 18: 1–248.
Galton, F. (1907) Vox populi. Nature 75: 450–451.
Hájek M, Dítě D, Horsáková V, Mikulášková E, Peterka T, Navrátilová J, Jiménez-Alfaro B, Tichý L, Horsák M (2020) Towards the pan-European bioindication system: Assessing and testing updated hydrological indicator values for vascular plants and bryophytes in mires. Ecological Indicators 116: 106527. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106527
Landolt E, Bäumler B, Erhardt A, Hegg O, Klötzli F, Lämmler W, Nobis M, Rudmann-Maurer K, Schweingruber FH, … Wohlgemuth T (2010) Flora indicativa – Ökologische Zeigerwerte und biologische Kennzeichen zur Flora der Schweiz und der Alpen. 2nd ed. Haupt, Bern, CH, 378 pp.
Surowiecki, J. (2004) The wisdom of crowds. Doubleday, New York, US, 336 pp.
Tichý L, Axmanová I, Dengler J, Guarino R, Jansen F, Midolo G, Nobis MP, Van Meerbeek K, Attorre F., … Chytrý M (2023) Ellenberg-type indicator values for European vascular plant species. Journal of Vegetation Science 34: e13168. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13168
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).
.
📸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!
***
Now, to keep up with our next steps in real time, we invite you to follow Pensoft on social media on BlueSky,X,Facebook,InstagramandLinkedin!
Don’t forget to also enter your email to the right to sign up for new content from this blog!
“What makes a paper successful?” is something authors would like to know when submitting a manuscript and editors when deciding on the acceptance of papers.
One answer is: “Write an exciting paper on a relevant topic with up-to-date methods”.
While this is certainly true, most authors feel that this is not the whole truth. The enormous efforts some authors invest in getting their paper accepted in a “high-rank” journal reflect the belief that the publication venue influences the scientific impact of a paper. Other authors spend quite some time in finding a “fancy” title for their contribution.
But do such “formal” aspects actually influence the impact of articles and, if so, to which degree and which are the most relevant ones?
Astonishingly, there is very little published evidence on these aspects.
Thus, I conducted an empirical study using my own publication output over the years. With almost 200 papers in over 50 indexed journals, it already allows some generalisations. With the three IAVS journals,Journal of Vegetation Science, Applied Vegetation Science and Vegetation Classification and Survey, being among the preferred outlets, the journal portfolio is probably also quite similar to that of other IAVS members.
As a common currency for citation impact, I used the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), provided by the Scopus database. While the absolute number of citations is not suitable for a meaningful comparison between papers as the number of citations always increases with time since publication, FWCI standardised citations compared to all articles published in the same year in the same subject field and as the same article type (e.g. research article vs. review article).
A FWCI of 1 means that an article is cited as much as the average, a FWCI of 2 refers to twice as many citations as an average article, etc. Scopus also provides a corresponding measure to FWCI at the journal level, namely the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), which essentially is the mean of the FWCI values of all papers in that journal in the respective period.
According to the multiple regression analysis, journal impact (SNIP) was the strongest predictor of the article impact.
However, alone it explained only 26.8% of the variance while other formal parameters together explained 31.5% of the variance.
Among those, the brevity of the title was most influential. Each word less in the title led to 9% more citations.
Further, both article length and author numberhad a positive influenceon citations.
Publishing in a special featureincreased the citation rate by 43%.
By contrast, open access or formulating titles as questions or factual statements did not significantly influence citation rates.
In conclusion, selecting a high-impact journal has less influence on the article impact than many people believe – the citation impact of different articles in one journal typically varies more than the mean citation impact between different journals.
For authors, the easiest way to increase the impact of a given article is to shorten the title as much as possible.
Caption: Variation of the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) values of articles in journals represented by at least five articles in the analysed sample, with box height proportional to the number of included papers. All three IAVS journals were well represented. The variation of citation impact within individual journals was very large (note the log-scale of the x-axis). For example, the best cited articles of the author in JVS, AVS and VCS all had a considerably better citation performance than the single Nature paper co-authored by the author (FWCI = 3.70).
At the Pensoft’s stand, delegates learned about the scientific publisher’s versatile open-access journal portfolio, as well as related publishing services and the Horizon project where Pensoft is a partner.
Here’s a fun fact: the University of Bologna is the oldest one still in operation in the world. It is also etched in history for being the first institution to award degrees of higher learning.
This year, the annual event themed “Biodiversity positive by 2030” took place in the stunning Italian city of Bologna famous for its historical and cultural heritage, in a way building a bridge between the past of European civilisation and the future, which is now in our hands.
***
At the Pensoft’s stand, delegates learned about the scientific publisher’s versatile open-access journal portfolio of over 30 journals covering the fields of ecology and biodiversity, as well as other related services and products offered by Pensoft, including the end-to-end full-featured scholarly publishing platform ARPHA, which hosts and powers all Pensoft journals, in addition to dozens other academic outlets owned by learned societies, natural history museums and other academic institutions.
In addition to its convenient collaborative online environment, user interface and automated export/import workflows, what ARPHA’s clients enjoy perhaps the most, are the various human-provided services that come with the platform, including graphic and web design, assistance in journal indexing, typesetting, copyediting and science communication.
Visitors at the stand could also be heard chatting with Pensoft’s Head of Journal development, Marketing and PR: Iva Boyadzhieva about the publisher’s innovative solutions for permanent preservation and far-reaching dissemination and communication of academic outputs that do not match the traditional research article format.
For example, the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal was launched in 2015 by Pensoft as an open-science journal that would publish ‘unconventional’ research outputs, such as Grant proposals, Policy briefs, Project reports, Data management plans, Research ideas etc. Its project-branded open-science collections are in fact one of the Pensoft’s products that enjoys particular attention to participants in scientific projects funded by the likes of the European Commission’s Horizon programme.
Another innovation by Pensoft that easily becomes a talking point at forums like ECCB, is the ARPHA Conference Abstract (ACA) platform, which is basically a journal for conference abstracts, where abstracts are treated and published much like regular journal articles (a.k.a. ‘mini papers’) to enable permanent preservation, but also accessibility, discoverability and citability. Furthermore, ACA has been designed to act as an abstracts submission portal, where the abstracts undergo review and receive feedback before being published and indexed at dozens of relevant scientific databases.
On Wednesday, delegates also got a chance to hear the talk by renowned vegetation ecologist at the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Editor-in-Chief at the Vegetation Classification and Survey journal: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Dengler. He presented findings and conclusions concerning neophytes in Switzerland, while drawing comparisons with other European countries and regions.
🌱 Presence of #neophytes is not necesarily problematic, and can actually have positive effect, concludes recent research on 🇨🇭Swiss #grasslands diversity.
At this year’s ECCB, Pensoft took a stand as an active Horizon project participant too. At the publisher’s booth, the delegates could explore various project outputs produced within REST-COAST, SpongeBoost and BioAgora. Each of these initiatives has been selected by the European Commission to work on the mitigation of biodiversity decline, while aiming for sustainable ecosystems throughout the Old continent.
In all three projects, Pensoft is a consortium member, who contributes with expertise in science communication, dissemination, stakeholder engagement and technological development.
Having started earlier this year, SpongeBoost is to build upon existing solutions and their large-scale implementation by implementing innovative approaches to improve the functional capacity of sponge landscapes. The project is coordinated by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and will be developed with the active participation of 10 partnering institutions from seven countries across Europe.
In the meantime, since 2022, the five-year BioAgora project has been working towards setting up the Science Service for Biodiversity platform, which will turn into an efficient forum for dialogue between scientists, policy actors and other knowledge holders. BioAgora is a joint initiative, which brings together 22 partners from 13 European countries led by the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE).
4/🧵 The @HorizonEU project @BioAgoraEU is to create an efficient platform for dialogue between #scientists, policy actors & other knowledge holders.
Still, REST-COAST, SpongeBoost and BioAgora were not the only Horizon projects involving Pensoft that made an appearance at ECCB this year thanks to the Pensoft team.
On behalf of OBSGESSION – another Horizon-funded project, Nikola Ganchev, Communications officer at Pensoft, presented a poster about the recently started project. Until the end of 2027, the OBSGESSION project, also led by the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) and involving a total of 12 partnering organisations, will be tasked with the integration of different biodiversity data sources, including Earth Observation, in-situ research, and ecological models. Eventually, these will all be made into a comprehensive product for biodiversity management in both terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.
On Tuesday evening, the CO-OP4CBD (abbreviation for Co-operation for the Convention on Biological Diversity) team: another Horizon Europe project, where Pensoft contributes with expertise in science communication and dissemination, held a workshop dedicated to what needs to be done to promote CBD activities in Central and Eastern Europe.
On the next day, scientists from the EuropaBON consortium: another project involving Pensoft that had concluded only about a month ago, held a session to report on the final conclusions from the project concerning the state and progress in biodiversity monitoring.
📌Eastern Europe and countries outside Europe underrepresented in the @EuropaBon_H2020 network, reports Christian Langer at #eccb2024bologna.
