One Ecosystem & Pensoft awarded three young scientists at ESP conference

03 November 2022

At the closing ceremony of the 4th European conference of the Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP), three aspiring scientists were recognised for their Best Poster Talks. The awards were given based on the votes submitted by all conference attendees during the week.

Between 10th and 14th October 2022 in Crete, but also online, the conference - hosted by the University of Patras and Harokopio University of Athens and running under the theme “Ecosystem services empowering people and societies in times of crises” - brought together a total of 417 participants - including 302 on-site attendees - from 50 countries, of which only 32 were European ones. A total of 393 speakers presented their latest work in front of scientists (63% academics and 16% students), but also people from governments (10%), NGOs (13%) and the private sector (13%).

Each day of the conference opened with a highly attended and engaging keynote speech, kindly provided by Mary YannakouliaEszter KelemenEsther TurnhoutRoy Bendor and Ana Vitoria de Magalhães, respectively. Starting from Tuesday, each morning, the conference would also start with a good laugh, thanks to Dutch comic artist Bas Köhler, who would recap talks from the previous day with the help of his funny, yet thought-provoking drawings.

In a nice, years-long tradition, One Ecosystem and the journal’s publisher Pensoft joined in the conference as sponsors and exhibitors, where they provided awards to the three Best Poster Talks, including a complimentary publication. To top up the recognition, the ESP gave a free annual membership to all three awardees.

The first prize went to Thea Wubbelmann, a PhD student at the Climate Service Center Germany in Hamburg for her poster: "Transdisciplinary education: A leverage point to foster transformative change for biodiversity conservation".

In their study, her team used a summer school organised annually in Peyresq, a small sparsely populated village in the French Alps, to learn about the elements that distinguish the summer school as “transdisciplinary education”, while finding how transdisciplinary education leads to transformative change for biodiversity conservation.

“The summer school is like a butterfly, beautiful in its uniqueness, easily discarded as unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but capable of contributing to a storm when integrated in the dynamic system,” write the authors.

The second prize for Best Poster Talk received Dr Kremena Burkhard, currently a Postdoc at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. Her poster focused on the co-benefits and risks of carbon sequestration in coastal ecosystems.

The third awardee became Alice Bertolini and her poster “Evaluating recreational ecosystem services: a case study of the Torre Guaceto marine protected area.”

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Are you on Twitter? Relive the highlights of the event via the hashtag #ESP22europe.

You can see the key moments from the closing ceremony - including the awardees and their winning posters - in this Twitter thread by One Ecosystem.

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