At a glance
- Up to €10,000 in catalytic support per working group
- Two in-person meetings (3-5 days each) at the Lab
- Open worldwide to researchers at all career stages
- Simple single-stage application process
- First deadline: 30 June 2026
What the programme is for
The hardest questions in biodiversity science are rarely single-investigator questions.
They sit between fields, between scales, between data and theory, between knowing and deciding. They are the kind of questions that rarely advance through incremental work alone. Instead, they benefit from intensive, face-to-face intellectual exchange, where a small group of people commits to several uninterrupted days of direct engagement, focused on a question or shared problem that matters.
The Biodiversity Futures Working Groups are launched to create the conditions for this kind of work.
What we offer
Starting on 11 May 2026, the Lab will issue occasional open calls inviting researchers from anywhere in the world to propose small, focused synthesis working groups.
Selected groups meet at the Lab — up to two times, three to five working days each — to do the kind of integrative, theoretical or data-synthesis work that often falls outside the scope of a single project or grant.
Each working group receives up to €10,000 in catalytic funding to enable intensive in-person synthesis meetings.
Beyond funding and a venue, the Lab itself is a core part of what is on offer. For successful applications, the Biodiversity Futures Lab leadership will assign two to three lab members to each working group, bringing expertise spanning biogeography, macroecology, community and theoretical ecology, global change biology, conservation and sustainability science across terrestrial, freshwater and marine systems. The involvement of Lab members is intended to complement and strengthen the working group’s objectives and should not be viewed as the starting point for developing a proposal.
What we want
We want proposals that take intellectual risks and are clear about why a working group, rather than a paper or a grant, is the right vehicle for the question.
Theory and conceptual synthesis are as welcome as data synthesis. We also welcome actionable work that translates between knowledge and decision-making. We are particularly interested in proposals that sit at intersections: ecology and economics, biodiversity and climate, planetary boundaries and conservation practice, mechanism and forecast, ideas and instruments.
What working groups should produce
A successful working group should leave the room with the seeds of one or more high-impact papers, a competitive grant proposal, a shared dataset or codebase, a conceptual framework others can use, a policy-facing output or, often the most durable outcome, a long-term research network that keeps producing after the funded meetings end.
We do not require all of these, but we do require that applicants make two cases: a case for why a working group is the right vehicle for the question, and a case for how the proposed work fits — and feeds — the Biodiversity Futures Lab’s own research. The programme is funded from internal resources; we commit them because we expect every working group to move our science forward, alongside the field’s.
Suggested themes for this call
- Drivers and dynamics of biodiversity change across scales
- Projecting biodiversity futures under uncertainty
- Trophic biogeography and macroecological
- Biodiversity conservation under non-stationarity
- Methodological frontiers in biodiversity research
- Biodiversity at the intersections — with planetary boundaries, climate, economics, society, the humanities
Who can apply
Lead PIs from any institution, anywhere in the world, are welcome to apply.
Standards we hold ourselves to
Three commitments shape every working group:
- at least 30% of the underrepresented gender in every group
- at least one early-career researcher
- data and code made openly available, under the least restrictive license, within three years of the final meeting
Travel from outside Europe is capped at 30% per meeting.
How calls work
The programme is funded from the Biodiversity Future Lab’s own research budget. We are a small group investing internal resources in frontier synthesis; for that reason, calls are issued occasionally rather than on a fixed annual cycle, when budget and bandwidth allow. When a call is open, applications are submitted via a single-stage form provided alongside the call. Applications are intentionally concise and designed to minimize administrative burden — for applicants and for us.
The first call is now open:
- Submission: 11 May to 30 June 2026 (23:00 CET)
- Decisions: approximately six weeks after the deadline
- Earliest project start: approximately three months after decision
Check full programme’s call and application form for more details.
Enquiries: Salvador Herrando-Pérez — shp@mncn.csic.es
Why this, and why now
Synthesis is not a method we apply to a problem. It is a way of asking what, taken together, all of this means — what holds across cases, what only holds in some, where our concepts need re-thinking, and where the empirical record is thinner than we might assume or admit.
Biodiversity futures are non-stationary, multi-causal and entangled with human institutions. Making sense of them requires reconciling data, methods and concepts that sit in different fields — work that single projects rarely complete and that small groups working together can.
Synthesis as an institutional practice is not new — NCEAS, NESCent, CESAB and the iDiv Synthesis Centre have shown what dedicated centres, funded at scale, can do. What is novel in what we propose is the level. We are running a synthesis programme within a single research lab, as part of how the lab does its science rather than as a service offered alongside it.
As far as we know, this format — public call, funded working groups, multiple structured meetings, an explicit synthesis remit — has not been operated at lab scale before. We are trying it because it fits naturally with the Lab’s broader commitment to international collaboration: a way of opening the lab outwards while keeping the questions our own.
We hope to build a small home for this practice. If you have a question that engages what the Lab does and has been waiting for the right format, this could be the moment to pursue it.