LifeWatch ERIC Biodiversity and Ecosystem eScience Conference (BEeS) is back. This summer, we have the pleasure of inviting you to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, for a four-day appointment, from 7 to 10 July. LifeWatch Bulgaria, through the Agricultural University-Plovdiv, hosts the third edition of the conference for 2026.
The event will start with a set of Pre-conference workshops on 7 July, while the plenary and contributed sessions will take place from 8 July onwards. Plenary speakers Prof. Vladislav Popov and Prof. Tatyana Bileva (Agricultural University-Plovdiv), Dr. Anne Fouilloux (LifeWatch ERIC), and Prof. Carl Beierkuhnlein (University of Bayreuth/Universidad de Granada), will present sessions on biodiversity conservation, responses to climate change, agroecology, as well as new frontiers for eScience technologies.
Besides the plenary session, the conference welcomes contributions collected through a Call for Abstracts, and a series of Masterclasses and Training sessions on how to use specific LifeWatch ERIC services. The abstracts collected will be published on the conference Book of Abstracts after the event, as well as submitted for publication on the ARPHA platform.
BEeS 2026 also offers some publication opportunities on three different journals, you can follow the updates on this page: https://www.lifewatch.eu/bees-2026-publication-opportunities.
We welcome participants to submit their abstracts for either a shorter, or longer contributed session (10 or 15 minutes), in one of the selected topics:
- Uniting science for human, animal, plant and ecosystem health
- Metagenomics and eDNA for biodiversity and ecosystems
- Animal traits, behavior and bio-tracking
- Biodiversity observatories and environmental monitoring
- Habitat mapping
- Biogeography: biodiversity conservation across regions and ecosystems
- Biodiversity and ecosystem responses to climate change
- Restoration of our oceans and waters
- Taxonomic data services
- Semantics and data curation for biodiversity and ecosystem research
- Soil mission & Microbiology
- Agroecology
The preliminary programme is available on the BEeS 2026 minisite, and the Call for Abstracts is open until 15 May: submit your work here: https://www.lifewatch.eu/bees-2026-abstract-submission. The registration form and logistic information will be published very soon. Stay tuned!
About LifeWatch Bulgaria:
Bulgaria joined LifeWatch ERIC in 2022 as one of its eight Distributed Centres (https://www.lifewatch.eu/organisation-governance/bulgaria), where the Agricultural University-Plovdiv is the official national scientific organisation. The Distributed Centre provides services such as lab and field testing, agricultural practices assessment, advanced agrobiodiversity monitoring and land use analysis, as well as open-source collaboration, AI services and plant health infrastructure.