FABI PhD student Joey Hulbert organised a session titled ‘Early detection and monitoring of invasive forest pests and pathogens with citizen science’ at the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress in Freiburg Germany. The session featured 12 presentations from seven countries on five continents. Joey Hulbert was inspired to propose the session through his experiences with Cape Citizen Science, a local FABI project through its DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Tree Health Biotechnology research group. This was the first session at an IUFRO Congress entirely focused on citizen science and tree health, and has become the basis of a network of citizen science project leaders in forestry.