This April, Miguel Bastos Araújo will join the keynote programme at Species on the Move 2026, a major international meeting convened every three years to examine how species and ecosystems are responding to accelerating climate change across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial realms—bridging science, conservation practice, policy, and diverse knowledge systems.

The 2026 edition will take place at Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan, a setting chosen to match the conference’s ambition: to think across scales (from physiology to ecosystems) and across disciplines (from modelling to management) in a place where rapid environmental change is already tangible.

The organising committee frames this as a tenth-anniversary meeting for the conference series, following earlier editions in Tasmania (2016), South Africa (2019), and Florida (2023), and expects a broad international attendance (150–200 participants, from more than 20 countries) organised around seven major themes.

A keynote lineup spanning macroecology, biodiversity change, and global ecology

Miguel’s keynote will sit alongside a set of confirmed keynote speakers that includes Evangelina Schwindt, Nina Yasuda, Gretta Pecl (founder of the conference series), Robert K. Colwell, Maria Dornelas, and Shen Feng Shen.

Several keynote abstracts already signal where the 2026 conversation is heading. Gretta Pecl’s plenary, A Decade on the Move, reflects on ten years of research on climate-driven redistribution and argues for more inclusive and interdisciplinary approaches as biodiversity shifts accelerate. Maria Dornelas will focus on the temporal dynamics of biodiversity and how communities reorganise through time, using global syntheses to link trajectories to stability, turnover, and conservation decisions.

Miguel will use his keynote to take stock of recent advances in biodiversity modelling—particularly models that move beyond single species to treat biodiversity as a community-level phenomenon. That shift matters. Many of the questions now being asked by conservation and policy actors are not, in practice, single-species questions:

• How will whole assemblages reorganise under climate change?
• Which species are likely to track changing conditions, and which are likely to be constrained by dispersal, habitat configuration, or biotic dependencies?
• Where do we expect novel communities to form, and what does that imply for conservation planning, restoration, and risk assessment?

Community-aware modelling is rapidly evolving to address these questions more directly. Miguel’s keynote will highlight what has changed in the last few years—conceptually, statistically, and computationally—and what still needs to change if we want projections that remain credible under accelerating environmental novelty.