Next week will bring me to Malaga, Spain, to a conference of the International Biogeography Society (IBS), a network of ecologists interested in the distribution of species.

I will go there as a representative of my two favourite global networks: MIREN, the Mountain Invasion Research Network, and SoilTemp, our network for the use of soil temperature data in distribution modelling. Both have broadly the same goal: improving our understanding of where species are living, and how the changing climate and human land use affect these distributions.

Last year’s meeting of the IBS was in Évora, Portugal, where we hosted a session on what the strong climatic gradients in mountains can teach us about current species distributions

Such questions are well-appreciated at the IBS, where biodiversity and where it is occurring is the main topic of discussion. To me, the main goal of the conference will be to find collaborators for our SoilTemp-project: people who collected soil temperature in the framework of their own studies, and that are willing to join forces with me.

The SoilTemp-network keeps expanding, but there are still a lot of gaps to fill on the world map. We are hoping to fill some of these empty voids at the upcoming IBS-meeting in Malaga.

I will keep you updated about my Spanish adventures, and will hopefully return home with a lot of great new science!