BE20 - Emerging Topics in Long-Term and Large-Scale Biodiversity Research
We warmly invite all biodiversity researchers worldwide, to join us in celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Biodiversity Exploratories at the first international BE20 Conference.
The event will take place from June 8–12, 2026 at the Langenbeck-Virchow Haus in Berlin under the theme:
“Integrating Emerging Topics in Long-Term and Large-Scale Biodiversity Research”
The conference will begin on Monday evening, June 8, 2026, with an opening lecture, followed by a welcome reception. From Tuesday, June 9, 2026, to Thursday, June 11, 2026, participants will have the opportunity to present talks in various sessions across different disciplines of long-term biodiversity research. For more details, please refer to “Call for Abstracts”.
We are excited to welcome several renowned keynote speakers, who will provide inspiring insights into long-term and large-scale biodiversity research. More information can be found under “Keynotes”.
In addition, the conference will feature workshops, discussion panels and social events to promote interdisciplinary exchange. On Friday, June 12, 2026, participants will have the opportunity to join a special excursion to our Schorfheide-Chorin exploratory, offering exclusive insights into the research conducted within the Biodiversity Exploratories.
The conference aims to bring together scientists from around the world and to create an interdisciplinary platform for discussing current challenges in long-term and large-scale biodiversity research. We look forward to numerous exciting contributions, lively discussions, and international exchange!
For questions or suggestions, please contact the Biodiversity Exploratories Coordination Office: beo@senckenberg.de
For technical questions with regard to the registration process and submission please contact the Registration Office:
KCS Kuhlmann Convention Service BE20@kcs-convention.com
We look forward to welcoming you to Berlin in June 2026!
Scientific Committee:
Markus Fischer | Nico Blüthgen | Marion Mehring | Marion Schrumpf |Stefanie Schulz |Paul Magdon | Peter Manning
Coordination Office:
Victoria Grießmeier | Franca Marian | Dong-Hee Maeng | Eva Schmidt
Session topics
1. Biodiversity, ecosystem function and stability
2. Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
3. Climate change and biodiversity
4. Land/Sea Use and biodiversity
5. Invasive species and biodiversity
6. Pollution and biodiversity
7. Aboveground-belowground interactions and soil ecology
8. Understanding indirect drivers of biodiversity change to enable transformative change
9. Methodological and technological advances
10. Remote sensing in biodiversity research
11. Landscape Ecology and spatial ecology
12. Macroecology
13. Population Biology and genetic diversity
14. Conceptual and theoretical advances
15. Biodiversity experiments
16. Biodiversity conservation
17. Ecological restoration
Conference registration opens on November 28, 2025 and will remain open until all spots are filled.
Participants who register until January 31, 2026, will benefit from an early-bird discount.
The registration process consists of several steps. Please make sure to complete all steps to successfully finalize your registration.
You can start your registration:
Fees and Payment
The registration fee includes access to scientific session, programme flyer, 6 coffee/tea breaks, welcome mixer and 3 lunches.
| Type/Fee | Early Registration | Standard Registration |
| Regular Standard | Euro 550 | Euro 650 |
| Student * | Euro 390 | Euro 450 |
* BSc-, MSc and Diploma-students; (does NOT include PhD-students, although see below for exceptions)
PhD students who do not receive project funding and/or who cannot get reimbursed for their registrations fees are permitted to register as „students“ but must send a letter, counter signed by their professor, to the conference office explaining the situation.
Optional Orders, bookings and fees
Get-Together and dinner
Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Time: 7pm
Location: Restaurant Nolle for a taste of Berlin Roaring 20’s, housed within a historic S-Bahn arch
Food: Vegetarian and Vegan
Rate: Euro 90.00
Excursion to exploratory Schorheide-Chorin
Date: Friday, June 12, 2026
Time: Full day
Rate: Euro 75.00
Payment
Bank transfer
Registration fees are due without deduction.
You will find the account details on the invoice, which you can download from your conference account.
Credit card online
Once you have submitted your registration a link will appear on your account to allow you to process your credit card payment through a secured payment system set up for the conference, Worldline (Saferpay). Please note any credit card transaction will appear on your statement as KCS Kuhlmann Convention Service.
Your Account
After registering online your password and username allows you to access your account at any time, to view the details of your online registration, view your payment status, print an invoice or submit an abstract.
Payments
All invoices are due ten (10) days from their issuance (“payment term”) and must be settled within this payment term. This applies to all invoices, as well as additional bookings such as conference dinner and excursions.
Cancellation and Refund of Tickets:
- Cancellations are only accepted in written form via email to be20@kcs-convention.com
- Registrations cancelled before April 30, 2026, will receive a full refund minus a cancellation fee.
- The cancellation fee is 40 Euros.
- Cancellations of additional program bookings such as conference dinner and excursion will receive a full refund if received before April 30, 2026. After the aforementioned dates, participants can no longer cancel their tickets. This also applies if participants are unable to attend the conference due to reasons such as illness, travel inability, visa application rejection, or travel restrictions.
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Our data protection policy for photos and videos applies
If you have any questions, then please contact us at: be20@kcs-convention.com
| BE20 Deadlines | |
|---|---|
| 28 November 2025 | Start online registration and submission for talks and poster |
| 31 January 2026 | Deadline for early registration |
| 31 January 2026 | Deadline for submission of abstracts |
| 30 March 2026 | Accepted contributions will be announced |
| 15 April 2026 | Full programme announcement |
| 30 April 2026 | Deadline cancellation to receive a full refund less cancellation fee |
| 30 April 2026 | Deadline cancellation additional programme bookings as excursions and conference dinner |
We warmly invite researchers from various disciplines to submit contributions addressing long-term and large-scale biodiversity research.
Interdisciplinary approaches are explicitly welcome, provided they have a clear connection to this research focus.
Starting November 28, 2025, you may submit your planned contribution to the BE20 Conference (oral presentation or poster) via the online submission platform:
The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2026.
Important: To submit an abstract, first complete the online registration form.
Please follow the steps to submit an abstract
- Create your account via the online registration form.
- Complete the full registration process.
- Once your registration is finalized, you can proceed to submit your abstract via the submission platform.
Topics
When submitting your abstract, please select the most appropriate main topic that best fits your contribution. If you feel the contribution also fits in another topic, please select this alternative topic. (1 = compulsory, 2 & 3. Preference = optional), or choose the option „other“.
Session topics
1. Biodiversity, ecosystem function and stability
2. Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
3. Climate change and biodiversity
4. Land/Sea Use and biodiversity
5. Invasive species and biodiversity
6. Pollution and biodiversity
7. Aboveground-belowground interactions and soil ecology
8. Understanding indirect drivers of biodiversity change to enable transformative change
9. Methodological and technological advances
10. Remote sensing in biodiversity research
11. Landscape Ecology and spatial ecology
12. Macroecology
13. Population Biology and genetic diversity
14. Conceptual and theoretical advances
15. Biodiversity experiments
16. Biodiversity conservation
17. Ecological restoration
Abstract Guidelines
Please indicate the type of presentation: poster or oral presentation.
- Each participant can submit a maximum of two
- The abstract should not exceed 180 words the equivalent of 1800 characters including spaces
- The title should clearly convey the key message of your research.
- Select at least one main topic and, if applicable, a subtopic from the list.
- Provide the full list of authors and their affiliations.
To ensure participation in the conference programme, the presenting author must complete registration and submission by January 31, 2026.
Confirmed session chairs
Nico Blütghen (TU Darmstadt), Caroline Dabard (UFZ), Veronika Gaube (BOKU), Norbert Hölzel (University of Muenster), Berta Martin Lopez (Leuphana), Paul Magdon (HAWK), Pete Manning (University of Bergen), Tim Newbold (UCL), Michael Schloter (TUM), Marion Schrumpf (UFZ), Steffi Schulz (Helmholtz Munich), Lara Urban (Hemltholz Munich), Wolfgang Weisser (TUM)
Social programme
We warmly invite all conference participants to join the welcome reception on Monday evening at the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus.
In addition, a conference dinner in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere will be offered at Restaurant Nolle. If you would like to attend, please indicate your participation during the registration process.
Get-Together and dinner
Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Time: 7pm
Location: Restaurant Nolle, S-bahnbogen, Georgenstraße 203, 10117 Berlin
Food: Vegetarian and Vegan
We are pleased to introduce the first confirmed keynote speakers
Richard Bardgett is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and co-Director of the Centre for Sustainable Soils in the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK.
Bardgett is a soil ecologist whose work explores how soils and their biodiversity regulate the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems and their response to global change. Most of his work is focussed on grasslands, where his recent work has been exploring how soil microbial communities and the biogeochemical cycles they regulate respond to and recover from climate extremes. Richard’s work in this area has led to foundational insights, but also the practical implementation of below-ground ecological concepts for climate mitigation and grassland restoration. Richard is also an avid writer, and has written several books on soils and their ecology, including his most recent book: “The Ecology of Soil: From Communities to Ecosystems” (2025).
Bardgett has spent most of his career in the north of England, where he was brought up and studied at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he gained his first degree in Soil and Land Resource Science in 1987. After a long period working at The University of Manchester, he recently returned to Lancaster University to establish the Centre for Sustainable Soils. He served as President of the British Ecological Society (2017-2019) and co-founded the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative (GSBI) in 2011 to promote the translation of soil biodiversity knowledge into policy. He is Executive Editor of Journal of Ecology and in 2023 was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by King Charles III for services to soil ecology and climate change science.
Andrew Gonzalez is the Liber Ero Chair in Biodiversity Conservation and a Professor in the Department of Biology at McGill University.
Gonzalez is a community ecologist and evolutionary biologist, recognized for his contributions to biodiversity science. His research focuses on the impacts of global change on the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape biodiversity. This includes investigating long-standing questions about species coexistence and the vital role of biodiversity in the structure and function of ecosystems.
Evolutionary rescue has been a key area of Gonzalez’s work. He conducted pioneering experiments with that tested early theories of evolutionary rescue. He has since spearheaded research advancing both the theory and experimental understanding of evolutionary rescue in response to single and multiple stressors, as well as within complex communities characterized by interspecific interactions. Gonzalez is also developing a framework for detecting and attributing biodiversity change in order to enhance the monitoring of eco-evolutionary dynamics and understand their impact on the goods and services provided by ecosystems. He collaborates closely with a variety of stakeholders to apply scientific knowledge to real-world conservation. He is an ISI Highly Cited researcher, a distinction given to the top 0.1% of the world’s researchers, across 21 research fields. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the founding Director of the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science. He also plays a leading role in international conservation efforts as the co-chair of the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) and as co-chair of the IPBES assessment on monitoring biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.
In 2018, he co-founded Habitat, a consulting company that provides biodiversity science to a range of clients in both the private and public sectors.
Rachael Winfree is a Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
The goal of her work is to better understand the causes and consequences of biodiversity change, particularly in real-world settings and at large spatial scales. She works with bee pollinators and pollination as a system and is active in pollinator conservation. Her work has been funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and has been published in leading scientific journals including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Ecology Letters, and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. From 2015-2019 she was one of approximately 170 scientists worldwide (and one of approximately 20 women) on the list of highly cited researchers in the field of environment / ecology.
Winfree is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America. She serves on the board of directors of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, which has the largest pollinator conservation effort of any nonprofit. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2001 and her B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1990.
Helmut Hillebrand is a professor at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and Director of the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB). From 1988 to 1994, he studied biology at the University of Oldenburg, during which his interests shifted from genetics and human biology to ecology and biodiversity.
After completing his PhD at the University of Kiel, he conducted postdoctoral research in Uppsala, later became a junior professor at the University of Kiel, and subsequently served as an associate professor of aquatic ecology at the University of Cologne. Since 2008, he has been teaching and conducting research at the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM) in Oldenburg, specializing in plankton ecology.
In 2017, he played a key role in founding the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, where he continues to serve as director. His research focuses on the mechanisms and changes in marine biodiversity—particularly under the influence of climate change and human activities—as well as on developing concepts for the protection of marine ecosystems.
Elizabeth Borer is a Regents Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. Her research quantifies how global changes, including land clearing, atmospheric pollution, and species invasions and extinctions, change the composition and function of the world’s ecosystems. Most of her work is in grasslands where she studies the effects of a changing environment on plant and animal biodiversity, disease transmission, and the identity and function of microbes inhabiting individuals (the “microbiome”). She sometimes strays into other ecosystems via collaborations and meta-analysis.
Borer is co-founder and co-lead of the Nutrient Network (“NutNet”) and DRAGNet, two global scientific cooperatives studying the effects of global changes on critical processes and functions in the world’s grasslands. The Nutrient Network, begun in 2007, now includes over 300 scientists performing identically replicated experiments and observations at nearly 180 sites in 29 countries spanning 6 continents. DRAGNet, extends this scientific cooperation to 36 countries, adding studies of disturbance and cessation at 60 additional sites.
Tim Newbold is Professor of Conservation Ecology at University College London. His research aims to understand the nature, drivers and consequences of global biodiversity change, with a particular focus on insect biodiversity and pollinators. Newbold’s work uses global-scale databases and advanced statistical methods to understand how environmental changes, particularly climate change and land-use change, are driving changes in the composition of ecological communities.
Newbold has also contributed to collating global ecological databases, notably the PREDICTS database, which documents the impact of human land use on ecological communities. He is also interested in the consequences of biodiversity change for human societies, and has published a number of studies on the impacts of land-use and climate change on animal pollination.
Duccio Rocchini is Full Professor at Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna from December 2019, after having been Associate Professor in Biology and Ecology at the University of Trento, from February 2017. He attained his PhD in 2005, dealing with remote sensing applied to the estimate of biodiversity.
After having collaborated with international researchers from institutions like U.S. Geological Survey, University of Nottingham (School of Geography, UK), Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (India), University of California Los Angeles (Department of Geography, US), he joined the Fondazione Edmund Mach in Trento in 2009, in the Dr. Markus Neteler’s GRASS GIS and Remote Sensing group, promoting open source algorithms for Ecology.
Over the years he promoted the development of open source algorithms for computational, mathematical, spatial and theoretical ecology.
Additional keynote will be announced shortly.
As part of the BE20 conference, a full-day excursion to the Schorfheide-Chorin Biodiversity Exploratory will take place on 12 June 2026. This research area, one of the three large-scale Biodiversity Exploratories, is located entirely within the Biosphere Reserve Schorfheide-Chorin in northeastern Germany. The region is one of the most sparsely populated landscapes in the country and is characterized by a diverse young glacial landscape with forests, wetlands, and species-rich grasslands.
During the excursion, we will visit selected study plots in forest and grassland ecosystems. Our researchers will provide insights into ongoing and past research projects, long-term monitoring programmes, and experimental approaches addressing biodiversity, land use, and ecosystem processes. A key feature of the project is that the study sites continue to be managed, allowing temporal dynamics in land-use practices to be observed. The only exception are the unmanaged natural forest plots, which are left entirely to natural development. Participants will also learn more about the coordination of the research infrastructure and the close collaboration with regional stakeholders.
For lunch, we will visit the historic Chorin Monastery. Its Gothic brick architecture and natural surroundings offer a unique atmosphere to reflect on the morning’s impressions while enjoying a regional meal. The region is also renowned for its rich biodiversity – with a bit of luck, you may spot cranes, white-tailed eagles, or black storks.
Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus
Luisenstraße 58/59, 10227 Berlin
https://www.langenbeck-virchow-haus.de
Directions
Nearby stops for public transport
Charité Campus Mitte: Bus 147, N5
Oranienburg Tor: Bus M1, N6 U; Tram U6
Invalidenpark: Tram 12, M5, M8, M10
From the Central Station Berlin Hbf to the venue
From Berlin Central Station, take bus 147 in the direction of Märkisches Museum and get off at Charité Campus Mitte.
Walking to the venue takes about 15 minutes.
Form the airplane to the venue
From Berlin Brandenburg Airport “Willy Brandt” (BER), take the train (FEX or RE7) to Berlin Central Station. Then take the bus 147 to Charité Campus Mitte. The trip takes about 40 minutes.
How to get to Berlin
By train
Berlin Central Station is the largest railway station in Germany. It is located in the center of Berlin, close to the government district. The station has several levels and offers countless national and international train connections to many European cities. ICE trains are the fastest and connect big cities in Germany and Europe. IC and RE trains are slower regional or intercity trains, and the S-Bahn connects different parts of Berlin. The station is modern, with many shops and restaurants, and represents Berlin’s dynamic and modern spirit.
By car
If you come by car, follow the motorway (Autobahn) to Berlin and take the A100 city motorway towards “Berlin-Mitte.” There is no private parking at the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus. But you can park nearby in public car parks. One is in Luisenstraße 47, and another in Reinhardtstraße 27. Both are only a few minutes’ walk away. Parking costs a small fee.
By long-distance bus
Long-distance buses usually arrive at the Central Bus Station (ZOB) in the west of Berlin. From there, you can take the S-Bahn from Messe Nord/ICC station (next to the ZOB) to Berlin Central Station (Hauptbahnhof).
By Airplane
Berlin Brandenburg Airport “Willy Brandt” (BER) is the main airport of the German capital. It opened in 2020 and is located about 25 kilometers south of the city center. The airport is modern and well connected to Berlin by train, bus, and taxi. Many international and national flights arrive and depart from here.
