From February 18 to 20, 2026, the MOTIVATE consortium held its project meeting at the Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research, Rennweg 14, Vienna. The three-day meeting brought together researchers from across Europe to discuss project progress, share results, and plan future analyses. The meeting was hosted by Michael Glaser, Franz Essl, Stefan Dullinger, and Bernd Lenzner, and organized around work package updates, invited talks, breakout sessions, and collaborative working time.

The Meeting

Day 1 focused on work package updates, with each team presenting the current status of their respective WPs. Teams from Halle (WP1), Vienna (WP2), Oviedo (WP3), Italy (WP4), Brno (WP5), and Oulu (WP6) reported on their progress, followed by an overview of WP7. The day concluded with a walking tour of Vienna and dinner at 575-Sagmeister.

Day 2 began with breakout groups covering topics ranging from future proposals and additional analyses to a policy paper writing session, data standards, and a resurvey protocol discussion. The afternoon featured a series of invited talks and concluded with a behind-the-scenes tour of the Vienna Botanical Garden greenhouses.

Day 3 was dedicated to a focused WP7 session led by Ute, buffer time for ad hoc discussions, and a final wrap-up of progress and next steps.

My Talk: Reconstructing Habitat Niche Expansion

On the second day, I gave a 30-minute talk titled “Reconstructing the Patterns of Alien Plant Species Habitat Niche Expansion.” This presentation built on the work I had previously shared at the Division meeting in January, now with additional refinements following the feedback I received there.

The central question of the talk was whether alien plant species progressively colonize new habitat types over time, and what drives this expansion. Using the European Vegetation Archive (1.9 million plots, 56 countries, nine decades), I applied the overrepresentation framework that compares species’ habitat distributions against local background availability within hexagonal grid cells crossed with 10-year time windows.

The results showed a clear residence time effect: species present for fewer than 20 years had a 17% probability of occupying more than one habitat, rising to 57% for species with over 200 years of residence. Man-made and ruderal habitats served as the primary invasion gateway, with expansion pathways typically leading into grassland habitats. Alpine grasslands and bogs showed the highest resistance to alien establishment.

The MOTIVATE audience provided constructive feedback, particularly on the potential for linking these continental-scale patterns to the resurvey data being collected across the consortium’s work packages.

Other Talks

The meeting also featured talks by Shuya Fan on plant community thermophilization across European habitats, Adam Clark on the impacts of observation error on estimates of vegetation dynamics, Jacopo Iaria on PlotDEM (an open relocation tool for quasi-permanent vegetation plots in mountain areas), and Gabriele Midolo on the research outcomes of the GRACE project.