NEWS AND EVENTS / JANUARY 2026
Highlights from the First Year of the NextGenCarbon project
Wed 14 January 2026, NGC Communication Team
NextGenCarbon colleagues at the 2025 Paris Annual Meeting.
A productive start for the project: here's what happened in 2025
The project’s first year in 2025 was an exciting and productive start for NextGenCarbon. We published six papers in leading journals, including Nature Communications and New Phytologist, and delivered four internal NGC Talks, featuring a total of eight presentations on topics ranging from new AI and observational tools to demographic controls on forest carbon cycling.
We welcomed six new colleagues to the team, completed four key project milestones, and published three public deliverables. In June, we held our first Annual Meeting in Paris, and the project was also represented at major international conferences, including COP30, the Living Planet Symposium, and Silvilaser.
In terms of outreach and engagement, NextGenCarbon grew its online presence and communication activities. On LinkedIn, the project reached over 400 followers, achieving an engagement rate of 1.9%—surpassing our target—while on Bluesky, the project gained more than 70 followers. Website traffic also increased markedly, with page views tripling to 643 and unique visitors doubling to 228.
In addition, we produced four Scientist Says interviews presenting the work of NextGenCarbon researchers across diverse fields and published four news articles.
“The project has got off to a strong start, and the second year will see us collaborating particularly closely with our sister project, CONCERTO. We will also work towards achieving our goals for the second year, with some exciting developments, including the production of four new public deliverables, such as the adaptation of the HILDA+ land-use and management data structure, and the creation of a database of ground and remote-sensing data extracted at site level”, says NextGenCarbon coordinator Rubén Valbuena.
“It’s been a strong start for NextGenCarbon, and we’re excited to continue building knowledge, collaboration, and impact in 2026”, he summarises.
Coordinator Rubén Valbuena at the Annual Meeting in Paris, 2025.
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NextGenCarbon - Next Generation Modelling of Terrestrial Carbon Cycle by assimilation of in situ campaigns and Earth Observations.