Department: BEeS 2026

Session:

Biodiversity conservation: preventing flora and fauna from extinction

Abstract:

“Local (agro)biodiversity and food as social and cultural capital – beyond the labelling and marketing strategies”
(1) Dessislava Dimitrova, (1) Teodora Ivanova, (2) Radostina Doneva
1 Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
2 Association for Breeding and Preserving of the East Balkan Swine

Bulgarian agriculture today has a diabolic structure – a handful of big landowners, mainly grain-producing private holdings and numerous small, extensive, semi-subsistent mixed farms. The depopulation of Bulgarian rural areas in the last decades has accelerated, hence (traditional) agricultural livelihoods and local food production have been abandoned on a national scale, with the number of agricultural holdings under 2 ha reduced by nearly 10 times in the last 20 years. Private farmers cannot effectively sustain local plant and animal genetic resources that, in the past, contributed to the national food sovereignty and positive traditional image of rural areas.
The loss of animal and plant genetic resources results in loss of traditional knowledge related to them, as well as food diversity that has been part of the cultural identity of local communities. Additionally, contagious animal diseases have caused reduction and destruction of animal farms.
Most severely hit were the farms for East Balkan Swine, an ancient native breed the population of which decreased from ca. 5000 animals by 2018 to less than 300 at the moment. Despite the awareness of the disease and efforts to comply with biosecurity measures, the lack of state recovery plans and restrictive regulations have severely hampered Bulgarian farmers. We discuss possible opportunities and obstacles to small-scale farmers and food producers whose production and sustainable farming practices depend on genetic resources under threat.
Acknowledgements: This study is funded by the Bulgarian National Science Fund in the frame
of the KΠ-06-H066/11 “Traditional food practices—a basis for diversification of the food market and social innovation in rural areas” project.

About Dr. Dessislava Dimitrova

Dessislava Dimitrova is a senior scientist at the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She is a botanist with over 30 years of experience in systematics, taxonomy, and plant conservation.

Over the last 20 years of her career she focused on ethnobotany of wild and cultivated edible plants, assessment of local plant genetic resources and the related traditional knowledge.

Since 2004 she is the Bulgaria and Balkans coordinator for the international organisation Slow Food. This motivated her to expand her expertise on ethnobiology in general, and for over 10 years her attention has been attracted by the case of the East Balkan Swine. Together with Radostina Doneva, the leader of the breeding organisation for this breed, they elaborated the application for a PDO about the fresh meat from East Balkan Swine.

Regretfully, the African Swine Fever hit severely the herds of the breed and today their efforts are focused on the revitalisation of the breed and support of the breeders.

Session:

Biodiversity conservation: preventing flora and fauna from extinction

Abstract:

“The Race against Extinction: Protecting Flora and Fauna before it’s too late”.
Tatyana Bileva & Gradimir Gradev

Biodiversity encompasses the multitude of living organisms on Earth and the ecological interactions that sustain ecosystem functioning. Despite its fundamental role in supporting human well-being, biodiversity is rapidly declining. Europe has a rich diversity of wild plant and animal species, including numerous endemic species.
Bulgaria ranks among the top five countries in Europe for biodiversity. Although small in area, the country’s territory includes parts of 3 biogeographical regions: Alpine, Black Sea, and Continental. The diverse relief, geology, specific microclimatic conditions, and millennia of human activity determine the rich diversity of species, communities, and natural habitats, a large part of which is of conservation importance. Here, we will illustrate through examples the need to protect nature.
In Bulgaria, trends in the restoration of species and populations in areas where they have disappeared align with modern practices, and several examples of successfully restored rare bird species can be cited. Emblematic examples include the restoration of nesting sites for the Lesser Kestrel, the Saker Falcon, and the Cinereous Vulture.
In the Bulgarian Flora, Strandzhanski bilkov chay (Sideritis syriaca) is a protected species listed in the Red Book volume 1, as “critically endangered”.
Ensuring resilient and healthy ecosystems is essential for maintaining the ecological foundations of Europe’s future.

About Prof. Bileva

Born in the southern Bulgarian city of Plovdiv in 1971, Tatyana Bileva is an Associate Professor of Ecology at the Agricultural University. After completing her higher education in Biology at Plovdiv University Paisii Hilendarski in 1995, she began working as an assistant professor at the Agricultural University. She holds a PhD in Zoology. A specialist in Ecology and Environmental protection, Agroecology, biodiversity, and species conservation, she has published over 70 scientific papers and 2 books. Tatyana Bileva has been Head of the Department of Agroecology since 2024. Associate Professor Tatyana Bileva has teaching and research activities in the field of Natural Sciences, biodiversity, environmental conflicts, ecosystem services, and sustainable management. She has experience in Operational Management and working on local and international projects.

Abstract:

“Agroecology research in Europe is increasingly evolving from a focus on isolated sustainable farming practices toward a systemic framework for transforming agri-food systems. Current trends emphasise the integration of biodiversity conservation, climate resilience, circular bioeconomy, digital technologies and participatory governance within farming systems. A major development is the growing use of Agroecology Living Labs and Research Infrastructures, where farmers, researchers, advisors, policymakers and other stakeholders co-design and test agroecological innovations under real-life conditions. The European Agroecology Partnership and initiatives such as BIOEAST are particularly important in accelerating research, innovation and networking across Central and Eastern Europe, where agroecology is increasingly linked with rural resilience, organic farming, biomass valorisation and regional innovation ecosystems.

At the same time, EU agricultural governance is moving from traditional compliance monitoring toward impact monitoring. Instead of only checking whether farmers implemented eco-schemes or biodiversity measures, the new approach evaluates whether these interventions actually improve biodiversity, ecosystem services and resilience. This requires integrated monitoring systems combining field ecology with digital tools such as remote sensing, drones, GIS, eDNA analysis, bioacoustics, IoT sensors and AI-supported biodiversity analytics. Effective impact monitoring should assess multiple dimensions, including pollinator populations, soil biodiversity, carbon sequestration, water regulation, climate resilience and socioeconomic sustainability. Future CAP and agroecology governance are expected to increasingly rely on evidence-based ecological performance indicators, supported by hybrid systems that combine digital infrastructures, scientific expertise and farmer participation in long-term landscape-level monitoring.“

About Prof. Popov:

Prof. Vladislav Popov is a professor at the Department of Agroecology of the Agricultural University of Plovdiv. He has professional experience in the field of agroecology, organic farming and environmental protection. Prof. Popov is one of the founders of organic farming in Bulgaria. He has significant international practical experience in over 24 countries around the world through scientific applied projects, training, dissemination and consulting in the fields of organic farming, agroecology and environmental protection.

Born in Kardzhali in August 1967. Between 1987 and 1990 he began his education at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy – Moscow. Subsequently, he graduated from the Higher Agricultural Institute – Plovdiv as an agricultural engineer in Plant Protection and specialisation in agroecology. He received his Master’s degree in Ecological Agriculture from the Agricultural University – Wageningen, the Netherlands on ecological farming systems.

From August 2001 to October 2005 he was a full-time doctoral student at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, College of Environment and Agriculture. Since 1996 he has been working in the Department of Agroecology, and since 2006 he has been an associate professor in the department and a lecturer in the fields of “Fundamentals of Organic Agriculture”, “Soil Pollution and Impact on Ecosystems”, “Agroecology”, “Ecological Farming”.

In 2006 he was appointed Director of the Agroecological Center at the Agricultural University of Plovdiv and as such he organises and carries out scientific and applied projects and programs, actively participates in the training of farmers, agronomists and specialists in the application of the methods and practices of organic and sustainable agriculture, environmental protection, integrated rural development, etc.

Evaluator of scientific projects under the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission, author of a textbook for students in the specialty “Organic Agriculture” of the Agricultural University, member of several international organisations and the ecological network of the Avalon Foundation – Netherlands, coordinator of organic agriculture of the project “New Thracian Gold”, which is implemented in the Eastern Rhodopes.

Abstract:

“We are living through both an ecological crisis and a revolution in computing, and how research infrastructures respond to the intersection of these two realities will determine whether biodiversity science is equipped to matter at the scale and speed the world requires.

Across domains, the most enduring research infrastructures have not been those that adopted new technologies reactively, but those built on a deep understanding of where computer science was heading: how knowledge would be represented, how machines would reason over it, how trust and provenance would be encoded, and how intelligence would emerge from federated, distributed systems.

Biodiversity science is no exception, and in many ways its complexity, scale, and heterogeneity make having sound foundations even more critical. This talk argues for a Foundations First approach to what we define as Biodiversity Intelligence, the capacity to transform distributed observations of the living world into robust, reproducible, and actionable knowledge for researchers, policymakers, and society. But solid foundations are not only about technology. The infrastructures that will truly serve biodiversity science are those that also rethink the human roles that build, maintain, and support them, moving from classical software development and user requirement collection towards Forward Deployment Engineering, where technical expertise meets user needs in the field, and preparing researchers themselves to become active, literate participants in an AI-enabled scientific environment rather than passive consumers of tools.

We will examine how foundational shifts in computer science, from FAIR Digital Objects and machine-actionable workflows to Digital Twins for ecosystem modelling and AI-assisted knowledge discovery, must be matched by equally deliberate shifts in how we train, organise, and empower the people behind the infrastructure. The conclusion is simple: serving users well, over the long term, requires both solid technical foundations and a new generation of people prepared to bring them to life.“.

About Dr. Anne Fouilloux:

Anne Fouilloux has over 20 years of experience in high-performance computing and Earth system science. Her career spans data-intensive computing and optimisation at CNRS-IDRIS (France), software development at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF, UK), research software engineering at the University of Oslo (Norway), and project leadership at the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC).
Her work is driven by the conviction that research infrastructures must serve society. She focuses on building scalable, open, and sustainable digital ecosystems that enable researchers, infrastructure providers, and policymakers to address real-world challenges such as climate change adaptation and biodiversity loss.

She has extensive expertise in FAIR principles, FAIR Digital Objects, and distributed e-infrastructures, with a strong emphasis on interoperability and data fusion across disciplines as foundations for Digital Twins, AI-driven analytics, and advanced environmental decision-support systems. A long-standing contributor to open-source communities, she champions approaches such as Discrete Global Grid Systems and cloud-optimised formats like Zarr to remove technical barriers and enable meaningful reuse of environmental data across infrastructures.

Main publications:

• Fouilloux A, Iaquinta J, Gupta AK, et al. (2023). Building on Communities to Further Software Sustainability.Computing in Science & Engineering, 25(3): 84–88.
• Fouilloux A, Trasatti E, Foglini F, et al. (2023). FAIR Research Objects for realising Open Science with the EOSC project RELIANCE. Research Ideas and Outcomes, 9: e108765.
• Magagna B, Fouilloux A, von Szombathely M, et al. (2025). Accelerating Climate Change Adaptation in Cities with FAIR2Adapt. REAL CORP 2025 Proceedings.

Abstract:

“Climate change and the loss of biodiversity are major environmental challenges on a global scale. Both syndromes exhibit multiple facets, and the interactions thereof are complex and scale dependent. Current anthropogenic changes in climate include decadal trends and short-term events, both in temperature and in precipitation. For ecosystems, emerging unexperienced climatic extremes in precipitation are most challenging. Biodiversity loss includes changes in species richness and in species assemblages. Taxonomic depauperation (loss of alpha diversity) and homogenization (loss of beta diversity) can reduce ecosystem stability and resilience. A better understanding of these processes is urgently needed, because important ecosystem services and nature’s contributions to people are at risk, with possible negative consequences for economy, health and societal stability. To provide knowledge for decision making and policy requires to link big data with modelling, and to link experiments with monitoring approaches across disciplinary borders. The right questions need to be asked, and focused research strategies need to be implemented. Here, I present ongoing research related to nature conservation, land use, and human health, where climatic conditions and forecasts are linked to ecological processes at different scales from local to continental.”

About Prof. Beierkuhnlein:

Dept. of Biogeography, University of Bayreuth, Germany and Departamento de Botanica, Universidad de Granada, Spain.

Diploma in Geoecology in 1989, Research Scientist NGO Friends of the Earth until 1991, Freelancer in Nature Conservation until 1994, PhD in 1994, Habilitation in Biogeography in 1999, Associate Professor for Landscape Ecology at University of Rostock from 1999 to 2002, Since 2002 Full Professor (Chair) for Biogeography at University of Bayreuth, Since 2025 Guest Scientist at University of Granada. Research: Oceanic Islands, Springs, Grasslands, Vector-Borne Diseases, Geodiversity.