Conference Highlights

NEOBIOTA 2026, the 14th International Conference on Biological Invasions, was held in Brussels from 7 to 11 September 2026. The conference series is an initiative of NEOBIOTA, the European Group on Biological Invasions, and brings researchers, practitioners and policymakers together every two years. This edition took place at the Tour & Taxis site, in two neighbouring buildings: the BEL building, hosted by Brussels Environment, and the Herman Teirlinck building, hosted by the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). The programme combined keynote lectures, thematic and general sessions, flash talks, poster sessions and a field trip on Wednesday, and the conference also hosted the final event of the LIFE RIPARIAS project, which focuses on moving from data to the management of biological invasions.

Tuesday opened with a keynote by Laura A. Meyerson, “Born from Destruction: Biological Invasions and Restoration Ecology”, followed by the LIFE RIPARIAS sessions. On Thursday, Anke Fischer spoke about understanding the success of invasive alien species as a policy concept, and Joana Vicente about prioritisation in invasion science, from risk ranking to adaptive governance. Friday’s keynotes came from Mark van Kleunen, on plant invasions in a changing world seen through macroecological analyses and small-scale experiments, and Melodie McGeoch, on governing biodiversity after the invasion era.

Our group from the Division of BioInvasions, Global Change & Macroecology at the University of Vienna was again well represented, with talks and posters from Franz Essl, Bernd Lenzner, Anna Schertler, Fabio Mologni, Ali Omer, Lisa Tedeschi and me.

My Flash Talk: Centuries of Habitat Niche Expansion

On Friday morning, I presented this work as a flash talk in the Herman Teirlinck auditorium: four and a half minutes, no questions.

Invasion risk assessments describe where alien species occur today, but not where they will occur. The accumulation of alien species in regional floras is well documented, yet whether individual species progressively colonise new habitat types over time had not been quantified. A species confined to disturbed roadsides today may spread into grasslands, wetlands and forests over the coming decades, while current risk frameworks treat habitat associations as static. Common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia) alone affected 13.5 million people with allergies in Europe before biological control, at €7.4 billion in medical and lost-work costs per year (Schaffner et al. 2020).

Together with Michael Glaser, Stefan Dullinger, Hanno Seebens, Bernd and Franz, I tracked 1,357 alien plant species across 18 habitat types in 1,023,883 vegetation plots from 55 European countries, recorded in the European Vegetation Archive from 1930 to today. For each species, we compared its occurrence in each habitat against how common that habitat was locally, within equal-area hexagonal grid cells, which identifies the habitats in which a species is overrepresented while accounting for uneven sampling.

The habitat niche keeps broadening with residence time. The share of species overrepresented in more than one habitat rose from 33% for species resident for up to 20 years to 74% for those resident for more than 200 years, and the number of habitats per species rose from 1.5 to 2.5, about one habitat more. The rise shows no plateau and continues past 200 years. Ruderal habitats are the gateway at every step, linking human-made and semi-natural vegetation, while few species were overrepresented in alpine grasslands and in mires (bogs and fens).

This points to a pervasive invasion debt: species introduced in recent decades, still confined to few habitats, may keep colonising new vegetation types for a long time, and ruderal habitats may be the place to watch for them.

Talks from Our Group

Anna’s flash talk, “When Fungal Blind Spots Spill Over: How Knowledge Gaps Undermine Invasion Science and Conservation”, was in the same Friday morning session as mine. In the Friday afternoon session on general contributions, Bernd presented a review of model-based scenarios on biological invasions, and Franz looked back on twenty-five years of NEOBIOTA and how it built a community for invasion science in Europe and beyond.

At the conference, Fabio turned a photo of Bernd into a Hulk meme and posted it in our group chat.

On Friday, Franz’s talk reached the slide headed “NEOBIOTA: The European Group on Biological Invasions”. Next to the title, on the big screen: Bernd. Green. Arms up. HULK SMASH INVASIVE SPECIES.

We like to do good work. We can also be silly and not so serious.

Posters on Screens

Posters were presented on numbered digital screens, with the audience following each short presentation through multichannel headphones. The main poster session ran on Tuesday afternoon with Belgian beer and waffles, and an open poster hour followed on Friday morning. Several members of our group presented their work in these sessions.

Brussels

Wednesday was the field trip day, and I used it for a city trip through Brussels instead, which had to include both of its famous peeing statues.

On Tuesday, I met Ingolf Kühn from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Halle, Editor-in-Chief of the journal NeoBiota, who works on plant invasions and macroecology, and during the week I caught up with Hanno, one of my co-authors. For food, I tried Aki Ramen and Heritage Kitchen. With Ruiling Liu and Fabio, I went to the Delirium bar, which has around 2,000 beers, and I tried a lambic, the spontaneously fermented beer of the Brussels region.

Conference Dinner

On Thursday evening, the conference dinner took place in the Dinosaur Gallery of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels, among the skeletons of what the organisers described as the largest dinosaur gallery in Europe.