Biodiversity Symposium 2026: Navigating Shifting Baselines in a Changing World

Each generation tends to take the nature it grew up with as its reference point. Without knowledge of earlier conditions, gradual biodiversity losses go unnoticed: what one generation would have seen as degraded, the next may accept as normal. This is known as the shifting baseline syndrome. As a result, decline becomes easier to accept, and our goals for nature risk being set too low.

At the symposium, three talks will take us from what our data can tell us, to how historical collections help us look further back, to why shifting baselines matter for conservation. Felix Neff (Agroscope) will show that trends in Swiss arthropod communities can change depending on the period analyzed. Alessia Guggisberg (ETH Zurich) will explain how herbarium collections are opening new doors for research today. Kevin Gaston (University of Exeter), whose work has helped shape our understanding of shifting baselines, will discuss what they mean for the future of biodiversity.

Join us in Dübendorf or online, and stay afterward for the apéro and tombola.

I am a community ecologist interested in the relations between global change and temporal and spatial biodiversity patterns. I did my PhD at WSL looking into effects of land-use intensity on plant-insect herbivore systems and a PostDoc at Agroscope investigating large-scale temporal changes in insect communities in Switzerland. At the moment, I am a researcher at Agroscope investigating biodiversity patterns in agricultural landscapes.

Throughout her career, Alessia Guggisberg has built a versatile academic profile in evolutionary botany, investigating questions related to the origin of polyploids, invasive plants, or the evolution of edaphic adaptation. As lecturer in systematic botany at ETH Zurich and curator of the United Herbaria Zurich, she aims at promoting biodiversity knowledge and supporting collection-based research projects using innovative tools to investigate plant evolution in space and time.

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Professor Kevin J. Gaston is a distinguished Professor of Biodiversity and Conservation at the University of Exeter. He leads basic, strategic, and applied research in ecology and conservation biology, with a current focus on common ecology, nighttime ecology, and personalised ecology. He was the founding Director of the Environment and Sustainability Institute from 2010 to 2017.

His research interests encompass biodiversity, conservation biology, ecosystem services, macroecology, and urban ecology. Presently, he and his research group focus on common ecology, nighttime ecology, and personalised ecology.

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