BMD participates in BioMonWeek 2026 with presentations and a booth
From 4 to 8 May, BMD co-hosted a booth alongside the EU-funded projects MAMBO and OneSTOP at the Biodiversity Monitoring Week (BioMonWeek) Conference in Montpellier, France. During the conference, project partners contributed to five sessions focused on strengthening collaboration across countries and developing a shared approach to biodiversity monitoring in Europe.
The Conference, co-organised by Biodiversa+, BioAgora, Alliance for Nature, GBIF, and MARCO-BOLO, welcomed science, policy, and business communities from all over Europe to exchange monitoring knowledge, build networks, and drive tangible societal impact to help reverse the global biodiversity crisis.
Highlights from sessions
On 5 May, Niels Raes from Naturalis Biodiversity Center, BMD’s coordinator, hosted a session “Biodiversity monitoring in terrestrial protected areas (including Natura2000)”. In his presentation, titled “High-throughput biodiversity monitoring and Biodiversity Analysis Tools in support of the EU Nature Directives”, he introduced the BMD project, the tools that the project will use in the process of biodiversity monitoring, and he also acknowledged the FAIR and Common European Data Space (CEDS) principles.
Christos Arvanitidis from LifeWatch ERIC talked about BMD and its connection to the EU-funded BiCIKL project and the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub during the session “Data infrastructures, coordination and interoperability”. He explained that BMD’s Biodiversity Explorer builds on technologies developed for BiCIKL’s Biodiversity Knowledge Hub - a one-stop portal for biodiversity research infrastructures in Europe.
BMD partner Tami Wooldridge from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) gave a presentation, titled “Mobilising Ethical Dialogue Methods in the Co-Design of Biodiversity Analysis Tools” during the session “Capacity building with genetic tools”. She reflected on the User Story Workshops for BMD and discussed the principles (design thinking, ethical dialogue) and methods (interactive workshops) for the co-design activities. If you’ve missed these opportunities, further in-person and online co-design activities will be facilitated in the future. If you are working to protect, monitor and restore Europe's biodiversity, we would love for you to join BMD’s Stakeholder Network.
Tami Wooldridge explaining the functionalities of the BMD Biodiversity Explorer
On 6 May, BMD partner Olaf Bánki from Catalogue of Life participated in the session "Tools for data use, curation, and management", where he discussed how policy data can be harmonised and used within the Catalogue of Life – a complete list of the world’s species, maintained by taxonomists all over the world.
Later that day, Niels Raes talked about BMD during the Cluster Event: The landscape of EU monitoring projects (co-organised by BioAgora and the European Commission) and participated in an interactive exercise.
On the final day of the BioMonWeek 2026 Conference, during the session "Biodiversity Data Cubes", BMD partner Niels Billiet from Meise Botanic Garden (MeiseBG) gave a talk on the topic of "A data cubing engine for analysis- and model-ready data in biodiversity monitoring". He explained what cubing engines are and how to use them in the process of analysing biodiversity monitoring data.
Niels Billiet presenting on the topic of data cubing engines
Exhibition
During BioMonWeek 2026, BMD co-hosted a booth with the EU-funded projects MAMBO and OneSTOP. The booth showcased various biodiversity monitoring tools, while our stakeholder engagement representative, Tami Wooldridge, answered questions about how BMD supports biodiversity monitoring in Europe and what it is like to be involved with the project.
BMD coordinator Niels Raes at the BMD, MAMBO and OneSTOP booth
BioMonWeek 2026 gave biodiversity monitoring experts an opportunity to discuss transnational cooperation and coordination across scales. Since BioMonWeek follows a biennial format, the next event will happen in 2028 in Turku, Finland.
