Biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate due to increasing pressures from human activities and climate change. This urgent situation calls for comprehensive biodiversity observations that can inform policy and action for conservation and restoration, while also advancing our understanding of biodiversity’s role in ecosystem functioning and resilience. Functional diversity, encompassing the diversity of functional traits within and among species, communities and ecosystems, is a key dimension of biodiversity. It links directly to ecosystem processes and services, and can be measured at multiple scales, from individuals to landscapes, incorporating both intra- and interspecific variation. This session invites contributions that explore how and why functional traits and functional diversity are changing across spatial (from local to global) and temporal (from diurnal to decadal) scales. We welcome a wide range of approaches, including in-situ, experimental or modeling studies, and close-range, airborne, or satellite remote sensing, and combinations of these methods. We welcome contributions from various ecosystems and taxa, including, for example, plants and animals in forests, grasslands or marine ecosystems. We particularly encourage contributions that connect functional diversity to ecosystem productivity, stability, or resilience, as well as to other biodiversity dimensions such as taxonomic, phylogenetic, or genetic diversity. This session aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and showcase innovative, integrative research. We welcome participation from researchers across disciplines, institutions, and career stages to contribute to a better understanding of functional diversity and its critical role in sustaining life on Earth.

Habitats from cryo-environments —such as the Arctic, Antarctic, and high-altitude regions—are some of the most fragile, understudied, and climate-sensitive ecosystems on Earth, making them highly vulnerable to climate change. Despite their apparent dormancy, they harbour specialized microbial and viral communities along with unique biogeochemical processes, now increasingly revealed through advances in metagenomics, transcriptomics, and other molecular techniques. This session invites experts in microbiology and biogeochemistry who, drawing on their knowledge of cryo-environments and their complex dynamics, investigate microbial and viral diversity — including microorganisms with unique biotechnological potential—, carbon storage, and nutrient cycling. Their unique and interdisciplinary research aims to understand these ecosystems thoroughly, helping to anticipate their future responses to a warming world.

Understanding how biodiversity shapes ecosystem functioning is a central question in ecology, yet many unknowns remain regarding its role in buffering ecosystems against environmental stress. Global changes such as climate warming, extreme weather events, and eutrophication are increasingly threatening the stability and functioning of ecosystems. This session will explore whether, when, and how biodiversity, particularly plant diversity, modulates ecosystem processes and resilience under such stresses.

To deepen our understanding of biodiversity - ecosystem functioning relationships under environmental stress, we invite contributions focusing on various scales and approaches. This includes plot-level experiments revealing mechanistic processes, regional and global datasets uncovering broad patterns, and conceptual and methodological advances. We particularly welcome studies addressing:
• Interactive effects of multiple, co-occurring stressors on biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships
• The mechanisms by which plant diversity influences resistance, recovery, and longer term stability of ecosystem functioning under stress, including elucidating thresholds and nonlinear responses
• Scale dependence in space and time of biodiversity–stability relationships
• Syntheses and comparisons revealing generalities or context dependencies

By integrating insights across scales and stressor types, this session will evaluate the robustness of biodiversity’s contribution to ecosystem resilience, giving a synthesis of current understanding and identifying key knowledge gaps to guide future research. The discussions in the session will also be relevant for biodiversity management and for improving predictions of biodiversity loss impacts under ongoing global changes.

The targets of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) explicitly call for preservation and restoration of forest biodiversity and ecosystem integrity. Guidance on how tree diversity should be managed to restore ecosystems and mitigate climate change is urgently needed. The rapid increase in the establishment and analysis of forest biodiversity experiments over the past two decades provides a basis for insights on how to manage global forests to achieve the CBD targets. This session aims to advance the understanding of consequences of tree diversity for ecosystem resilience and climate mitigation using these experiments. We encourage contributions on deciphering resilience mechanisms as well as promoting biodiversity-positive climate solutions. Contributions could consider different aspects of biodiversity effects regarding climate mitigation (e.g., carbon storage, temperature buffering) and adaptation (e.g., stability, resistance, resilience), approaches to measure these (e.g., remote sensing, genetic approaches to detecting adaptation), and discussion of potential mechanisms. We also welcome submissions on how to design experiments for the future to co-benefit climate mitigation actions and biodiversity conservation from researchers across continents, climate zones and different research backgrounds.

Fungi play crucial roles in ecosystems as decomposers of dead organic matter and through biotic interactions as parasites, pathogens, symbionts, etc. Thereby, they directly or indirectly influence the biodiversity of other groups of organisms. Despite their importance, major gaps remain in our understanding of fungal biodiversity and conservation. Partly as a consequence of these knowledge gaps, fungi have been underrepresented in biodiversity monitoring programs, conservation planning, and policy frameworks. Recent large-scale initiatives have confirmed the ubiquity and ecological significance of fungi and taken the first steps towards their systematic monitoring and conservation. Pioneering efforts — e.g. the integration of fungi into national Red Lists and biodiversity action plans in South America and Europe and the creation of KBAs based on fungi in Central Africa — demonstrate that progress is possible when science, policy, and conservation action align. In this session, we will discuss how to overcome knowledge and policy gaps related to fungal biodiversity and conservation, and how we can upscale and harmonize monitoring and conservation of all groups of fungi across different ecosystems and geographies. We also want to discuss how a fungal dimension to monitoring and conservation could benefit conservation overall, and explore how already established programs can be adapted to cover fungi. We also invite contributions and discussions on how novel technologies and approaches can be applied, and how we can ensure that this endeavour includes all elements of the global society. Contributions to the session can provide individual case studies or conceptual ideas, but they should contribute to improving biodiversity monitoring and conservation of fungi.

Rapid climate change and increasing human activity (industry, tourism) are impacting Arctic biodiversity, putting the uniquely cold-adapted ecosystems of the region under threat. The consequences of changes to and losses in Arctic biodiversity have wide-reaching impacts themselves, from the subsistence of Indigenous and local livelihoods to global climate feedbacks. Looking into the future, we therefore need sustainable and lasting approaches that will enable Arctic biodiversity to adapt to these pressures. For this session, we invite submissions from all backgrounds that help us better understand and care for Arctic biodiversity and its future - locally, regionally and across the North. This includes submissions on marine and terrestrial biodiversity, Indigenous approaches, policy-making, social and natural sciences. We welcome abstracts providing perspectives from individual disciplines (for example, a research report or a story), as well as those that combine multiple ways of understanding the Arctic, including knowledge co-creation (for example, Two-Eyed Seeing) and interdisciplinary approaches. Talks may take any format in the allocated time slot (e.g., slides, storytelling, etc.) and we intend to close the session with a short discussion allowing for a group-based reflection. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Insects are essential to terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, yet evidence from around the world points to widespread declines in their abundance, diversity, and biomass. These losses threaten ecosystem services such as pollination and pest control, with cascading effects on other species and human well-being. However, major gaps remain in understanding the magnitude, pace, and patterns of declines, the relative importance of drivers, and the evidence for insects’ critical roles in ecosystem functioning and services. At the same time, strategies for recovering insect populations—particularly in agricultural and human-dominated landscapes—are still not fully synthesized.
This session will bring together researchers, conservationists, and policymakers to present the latest findings on insect population trends across biomes and taxa. We welcome advances in long-term monitoring, meta-analyses, and novel data sources that close geographical and taxonomic gaps, and studies examining drivers of decline, such as land-use or climate change. We also invite research quantifying insects’ ecological and societal importance, showing how their diversity and abundance underpin ecosystem functioning, resilience, and service delivery.
In addition to diagnosing decline, this session emphasizes solutions. We welcome contributions presenting evidence for insect conservation and restoration, evaluating what works, where, and at what scale. We also welcome studies on the enabling conditions for success, such as policy interventions or governance approaches. By integrating knowledge on drivers, impacts, and solutions, this session aims to chart a path to halt and reverse insect biodiversity loss, securing resilient ecosystems and their benefits for future generations.

Ongoing losses of biodiversity and ecosystem functions are largely driven by anthropogenic stressors, including land use change, climate change, and pollution. High-resolution time series are a prerequisite to understand these changes, but are limited in space, time, and taxonomic coverage, and are often inaccessible.
In recent years, several valuable biodiversity time series data have successfully been mobilized and published in accessible repositories (e.g., BioTime), resulting in substantial improvements in our understanding of biodiversity change in the Anthropocene. Yet, there are still huge data and knowledge gaps, particularly in functional changes and notoriously understudied taxonomic groups like insects and fungi. Additionally, biodiversity monitoring is still insufficiently co-located with in situ measurements of ecosystem functions, environmental drivers, and social-economic implications, including nature’s contributions to people. Recent research infrastructures, including eLTER (https://elter-ri.eu/) and NEON (https://www.neonscience.org/), have started filling in these gaps.
This session aims to bring together biodiversity researchers, environmental monitoring experts, including larger research infrastructures, authorities, and NGOs. We seek contributions addressing:
• multi-decadal changes in biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and their drivers at local, regional, or global scales covering marine, freshwater or terrestrial ecosystems
• improved statistical methods to measure trends and link to associated drivers
• social-economic implications of biodiversity change
• potential ways forward to overcome current data limitations in the dimension, drivers and consequences of biodiversity change and impacts on functions in the Anthropocene.

Novel ecosystems—assemblages that diverge from historical baselines in composition, function, and dynamics—are increasingly widespread, yet their role in biodiversity futures remains contested. Some view novelty as a loss of ecological integrity, while others emphasize its potential to sustain biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and human well-being under accelerating global change. This session seeks to advance conceptual clarity by critically examining what constitutes novelty, how it differs across ecological and cultural contexts, and how these definitions shape scientific, management, and policy responses.

We will explore implications for biodiversity futures, recognising how novel ecosystems both challenge conservation targets based on historical reference conditions and open opportunities for resilience, ecosystem service provision, and adaptive governance. The session will also showcase emerging methods for anticipating novelty, including detection frameworks, scenario modelling, and early-warning indicators that can identify thresholds, forecast trajectories, and assess trade-offs between resisting, guiding, or accepting novelty.

Finally, contributors will examine governance and ethical dimensions of ecological novelty. Central to this discussion are questions of when, and under what conditions, acceptance of novelty is ecologically, socially, or ethically legitimate. By engaging diverse disciplinary and practice-based perspectives, the session will provide critical insights into how we define, anticipate, and govern novel ecosystems, and how these choices shape pathways to biodiversity futures.

Healthy soils are the foundation of sustainable agricultural production. The importance of soil biodiversity for a resource-efficient and stress-resilient agriculture is increasingly being recognized, with initiatives like the EU's Horizon Soil Missions leading the way. However, the best farming practices that enhance soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in specific contexts and under future climate conditions – including those targeting aboveground diversification – remain to be determined.

In this 180 min workshop, we aim to bridge this gap by bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders involved in past and current European research projects – including agronomists, biologists, soil scientists, social scientists, agricultural advisors, and policymakers. Together, we will identify the most efficient and context-specific practices for enhancing biodiversity and the functioning of agroecosystems without compromising agricultural production. We plan to invite participants from ongoing and completed EU projects working at the intersection of sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, and soil health, as well as anyone interested in contributing to this important dialogue.

Workshop structure:
1) 4-6 presentations from invited EU projects highlighting key insights and challenges (60 + 10 min break).
2) Group discussions to share and reflect on best practices for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (50 + 10 min break).
3) Plenary session to synthesize discussions into a draft roadmap for future research and policy (50 min).

Expected outcomes:
1) A strong expert network across biodiversity realms to support future sustainable agroecosystem projects.
2) A roadmap paper consolidating current knowledge and outlining key research gaps and policy priorities.