Foreword to the special issue arising from the 9th European Conference on Mineralogy and Spectroscopy

Spectroscopy methods provide valuable information about the local structure of minerals, since they do not depend on long-range periodicity (they are sensitive to defects or substitutions and vice versa), and, therefore represent great complementary techniques to diffraction methods that are used to analyze periodic (global) structures of minerals. Spectroscopy techniques have been successfully applied to the minerals during past decades, namely due to still-growing possibilities connected with the evolution of the instrumentation and data analysis. Following the European Spectroscopic Conferences in Rome (1988), Berlin (1995), Kiev (1996), Paris (2001), Vienna (2004), Stockholm (2007), Potsdam (2011) and Rome (2015), the 9th European Conference on Mineralogy and Spectroscopy (ECMS 2019) took place at Břevnov Monastery, Prague, Czech Republic on September 10–13, 2019. The conference brought together 111 participants from 20 countries. One hundred two oral and poster contributions were presented during three days. Among these contributions, six invited keynote-talks were presented by Peter C. Burns (University of Notre Dame, USA), Janice Bishop (SETI Institute, USA), Sergey V. Krivovichev (St. Petersburg State University, Russia), Anna Vymazalová (Czech Geological Survey, Czechia), Jural Majzlan (Friedrich Schiller Universität, Germany) and Sergey S. Lobanov (GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, Germany). About one third of the delegates were students, who had the opportunity to present their work to broad international audience. Two workshops focused on gemstone deposits and training in crystallographic com-