Anne Chao

Institute of Statistics, University National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan


Anne Chao is a Professor in Statistics. She is currently 60% statistician, 30% mathematician, and 10% ecologist. For over 40 years, she has been fascinated by the mathematical and statistical challenges that arise in ecology and environmental sciences. Her expertise lies in ecological statistics, statistical methodologies, and statistical sampling/analysis of survey data. Together with her colleagues and students, she has developed several biodiversity measures/estimators, including Chao1, Chao2, ACE, and ICE, which are used to assess species richness. She has also contributed novel standardization methods and software (including iNEXT, iNEXT.3D and iNEXT.beta3D) for inferring and comparing biodiversity across scales.

Pia Bradler

Leuphana University Lüneburg and the Technical University of Dresden

Pia Bradler is a doctoral researcher. She has a background in global change ecology and has worked on investigating the impacts of global change, particularly warming and land use change, on plant communities and functional diversity. Her current work focuses on how an increase in structural heterogeneity in temperate managed forests affects understory plant diversity and functioning across spatial scales using iNEXT in different analyses.

Keynote:
The flavours of iNEXT - quantification of biodiversity in the footprints of Alan Turing

Lorenzo Marini

University of Padova, DAFNAE

Lorenzo Marini is a professor of general and applied entomology at the University of Padova. His research focuses on understanding how major anthropogenic pressures impact plant and insect diversity, as well as associated ecosystem services, with the ultimate goal of developing management solutions to mitigate negative effects on agricultural and natural ecosystems. In agroecology, he primarily works on plant protection and pollination, contributing to the design of sustainable cropping systems. His research also extends to global change, species range shifts, and biological invasions. He employs diverse methodological approaches, including manipulative experiments, observational studies, macroecological analyses, and syntheses. Following various international research experiences, he established his research group at the University of Padova in 2011, creating multiple Ph.D. and postdoctoral positions funded by European, national, and regional research grants.

Keynote:
Agroecology in a changing world: challenges and novel frontiers

Zuzana Buřivalová

University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, The Sound Forest Lab

Zuzana Buřivalová is Assistant Professor and the Principal Investigator of the Sound Forest Lab. She is a tropical forest ecologist and conservation scientist, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is affiliated with the department of Forest & Wildlife Ecology, The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE). Before joining UW-Madison, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at Princeton University and The Nature Conservancy, and received her PhD at the ETH Zürich and BA at Oxford.

Zuzana researches ways to protect biodiversity in tropical forests, both forests that are used by people, for example for logging, and forests set aside for conservation, from national parks to small community protected areas. She tries to answer tricky questions in tropical forest ecology using new technologies, such as through recording soundscapes, where traditional field methods aren’t enough. She also collaborates with the environmental news platform Mongabay on understanding, which conservation strategies succeed and fail in tropical forests. Zuzana feels privileged to have worked in the tropical forests of Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Borneo, Gabon, Peru, and Ecuador.

Zuzana is the 2021 winner of the nature award for driving global impact. In 2023, she received the Bassam Z. Shakhashiri Public Science Engagement Award, and the WINGS Women of Discovery Award.

Keynote:
Listening to nature – a rising tool in ecology and conservation

Jos Barlow

Lancaster Environment Centre (UK) Federal University of Pará (Brazil)

Jos Barlow is a professor in conservation science at Lancaster Environment Centre (UK) and a professor of ecology at the Federal University of Pará (Brazil). His work addresses how human activities impact tropical forest biodiversity and the ecosystem services and functions that biodiversity delivers, with a focus on the Brazilian Amazon where he has been working since 1998. He is a co-founder of the Sustainable Amazon Network (Rede Amazônia Sustentável), which brings together scientists, conservation practitioners and local stakeholders to further our understanding of the environmental and socio-economic trade-offs in the world's largest remaining expanse of tropical forest. He is a Trustee of WWF-UK, Lead author & member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the UN’s Science Panel for the Amazon, and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Applied Ecology.

Keynote:
From Rio92 to COP30: Assessing Amazonia’s changing solution space

Jean-Philippe Lessard

Concordia University in Montreal, Canada

Dr. Jean-Philippe Lessard is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and the Editor-in-Chief of Ecological Monographs, a journal of the Ecological Society of America. His current research investigates the ecological, evolutionary and anthropogenic determinants of biological diversity from local to global scale, geographic range dynamics and ecosystem function. Much of his empirical work uses insects and in particular ants, as a study system. He obtained his BSc from McGill University and his PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Tennessee. He then pursued postdoctoral work at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, based at the University of Copenhagen and at the Quebec Center for Biodiversity Science, based at McGill University.

Keynote:
Living on the Edge: What Determines Species Range Limits?