December 10th, 2024
The 21st EBP meeting and a LIFE EBP Reinforcement workshop bring together 36 participants from 18 countries in Podgorica, Montenegro
One of the objectives of the LIFE EBP Reinforcement project
is to increase the quantity and quality of bird observations from SE Europe,
therefore, we took this opportunity to set up a regular EBP meeting in the core
area, in Podgorica, Montenegro. The meeting lasted for three days, from 28 till
30 October 2024, and was held in the building of the Ministry of Sustainable
Development and Tourism, with our Montenegrin partners, CZIP, taking care of
the logistics.
The first day was dedicated to the regular EBP meeting,
where Gabriel Gargallo, EBP project coordinator, presented the last advances of
the EBP project, after which we used the opportunity to present the progress on
each work task of the ongoing LIFE EBP Reinforcement project to a larger EBP
community. Finally, we finished with the update on the work done within the
Bird Flu Radar presented by Ruud Foppen from SOVON.
We used the second day to talk in more details about
specific work tasks and activities related to the LIFE project. Petr Voříšek
from CSO, gave an overview of the standardised bird monitoring data received
from the project partners within the International Census Plots (ICP), which
also served as immediate feedback to the partners from SE Europe. From the
overview it was clear that the partners have managed to exceed the number of pre-set
ICP plots for the given year, and the session ended with a fruitful discussion
of partners’ experience from the field and issues they faced, with potential
solutions.
Afterwards, we moved to the workshop on EBP data flow
implementation, where Gabriel Gargallo and David Martí from ICO gave an
overview on the state of the connectivity of all EBP partners regarding the
update on including the data for all bird species occdurring in Europe and the
protocols information, as well as presenting the internal tool that partners
use for this update. The situation of each partner is more diverse here, but it
seems that all partners are on a good way to make this connection until the end
of this year. Marc Illa from ICO also talked about taxonomy mapping and
clearing any doubts with partners on the instructions they received previously.
Finally, we ended the second day with the workshop on
sensitive species, by providing the overview of the questions on sensitive
species partners answered in advance, and a proposal of how to deal with the
sensitive species within the EBP project, followed by an open discussion.
The last day was dedicated to concluding the workshop on
Regional Dynamization Campaign (RDC) by finalizing the campaign proposal and
setting up final dates. The first part of the workshop was held on-line at the
beginning of October, and we used the opportunity of this physical meeting to
conclude the work to be done in the following year and a half within the RDC.
Overall, this meeting brought together 36 participants from 18 countries, as well as a lot of interesting discussions and conclusions that were much needed for the progress of the overall EBP project.
