Franz Essl
University of Vienna, Dept. of Botany and Biodiversity Research
Franz Essl is a professor and biodiversity researcher at the Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research at the University of Vienna. He is considered a leading expert in biodiversity research with a focus on global change biology and plant invasions. He has published more than 370 scientific publications and several textbooks. He is a member of the executive team of the Austrian Biodiversity Council. Franz Essl was named "Scientist of the Year" in Austria by the Club of Austrian Science Journalists in 2022.
Mitja Kaligarič
University of Maribor, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
Prof. Mitja Kaligarič is a botanist and vegetation ecologist at the University of Maribor, Slovenia. He earned his PhD in phytosociology under the supervision of Prof. L. Poldini and Prof. T. Wraber. He held two research grants at the University of Trieste, led several bilateral collaborations with CNR Firenze and the University of Vienna, and served as principal investigator on multiple national and international projects. His research focuses on grassland and halophyte vegetation and dynamics, landscape ecology, and plant conservation biology. Prof. Kaligarič has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications and several monographs. He has supervised five PhD theses at the Universities of Maribor and Ljubljana. He is a member of the editorial boards of several international journals and currently serves as editor of Acta Botanica Croatica.
Nate McDowell
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Nate McDowell was trained as a plant physiological ecologist. He has a masters degree from the University of Idaho, a PhD from Oregon State University, and is currently a staff scientist at Pacific Northwest National Lab. His focus is on integrating tools and approaches to understand vegetation structure and function under shifting environmental drivers.
Heimo Rainer
Natural History Museum of Vienna, Department of Botany
Heimo Rainer is the Head of the Dept. of Botany in the NHM of Vienna. He is also coordinator and operator of the virtual herbarium and botany collections management platform JACQ (https://www.jacq.org). He is also engaged in several International projects, such as Species2000, BHL-Europe, i4Life, OpenUp!, Europeana DSI and DSI 2, Catalogue of Life. He wa part of several EU funded initiatives, and is part of the National Node of the ESFRI DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections, https://www.dissco.eu). He coordinates the Open Scientific Collections Austria (https://osca.science) and the Digitization Working Group of CETAF. Ha carries out field studies in tropical regions of South and Middle America and the Antillean Islands. He also collaborates to the “Catalogi Florae Faunae Austriae” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
William B. Sanders
Florida Gulf Coast University, Department of Biological Sciences
William B. Sanders was born in New York, and studied botany as an undergraduate at Cornell University. He completed his Ph.D. on development of the lace lichen Ramalina menziesii at the University of California, Berkeley, under the mentorship of Donald R. Kaplan, John W. Taylor, and Isabelle I. Tavares. He carried out postdoctoral research on lichen structure in Madrid for many years, and served as visiting professor at the Federal University in Recife, Brazil, from 1998 to 2001. He has been professor of biological sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University from 2007 to 2025.
