Biodiversity Symposium 2025: Biodiversity Monitoring: New Approaches and Techniques

Nerea Abrego is an Associate Professor in community ecology at the University of Jyväskylä. Abrego’s main research interest is to unravel how ecological and evolutionary processes generate variation in species-rich communities. Abrego is particularly interested in investigating the scale dependency of assembly processes and assessing the interactions among these processes across space and time. An important part of Abrego’s research is devoted to resolving methodological challenges that hinder current developments in community ecology: developing empirical methods for efficiently acquiring community data and statistical methods for efficiently analysing such data. Among the empirical methods, Abrego has done pioneering work in using airborne DNA sampling to study fungal distributions. Among the statistical methods, the most notable work is the development and application of joint species distribution models, which allow researchers to simultaneously analyse the distributions of multiple species while accounting for environmental predictors, species traits and phylogenies. Website

Fabian Schneider is an Assistant Professor in the Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity Section at Aarhus University, and Theme Lead for Digital Landscape Analyses at the Land-CRAFT Pioneer Center. He received his PhD in the University Research Priority Program on Global Change and Biodiversity (URPP-GCB) at the University of Zurich. In 2018, he started a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology. He got appointed as research scientist at JPL in 2021, where he developed new methods for monitoring ecosystem and biodiversity change with remote sensing from space. He is interested in understanding how climate and biodiversity changes are impacting ecosystems and their functions by integrating remote and in-situ observations, models and experiments. Website

Devis Tuia completed his PhD at University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he studied kernel methods for hyperspectral satellite data. He then traveled the world as a postdoc, first at University of València, then at CU Boulder and finally back to EPFL. In 2014, he became assistant professor at University of Zurich, and in 2017 he moved to Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where he was chair of the Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing Laboratory. Since September 2020, he is back to EPFL, where he leads the Environmental Computational  Science and Earth Observation laboratory (ECEO) in Sion. There, he studies the Earth from above with machine learning and computer vision. Website