April 15th, 2019
The 14th EBP meeting takes place at Évora, Potugal
The 14th EBP meeting took place in Évora, Portugal, on April 8th 2019. Unlike previous meetings, the reunion was quite short (one morning only) but benefited from the fact that many people were attending the Bird Numbers 2019 conference (which took place also in Évora and started the same day in the afternoon).
A total of 22 persons from 12 different countries attended the event this time.
The meeting took place at the wonderful senate room of Colégio do Espírito Santo, University of Évora
The state of the implementation of the automated data flow and the launch of the LIVE EBP viewer were two of the key points of the agenda. The progress made during the last months has been amazing and by the time of launching 15 online portals and more than 99% of the whole EBP data will be connected automatically on a daily basis.
The lessons learnt and considerations for future developments (e.g. addition of new species) were also discused. The option to compare LIVE maps with previous year data will be impleted most probably before summer.
An overview on the progress of the LIFE EBP project, which will be ending on April 15th, was also presented.
Another important point in the agenda was related to the future developments of the project and the options for funding.
In particular, the H2020 funding opportunities seemed to be particularly well suited for our initiative. One of the calls, "SC5-33-2020: Monitoring ecosystems through research, innovation and technology", is directed to proposals that shall design an EU-wide framework for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services and, therefore may be particularly interesting for us. However, such an application would require a very strong consortium and, most probably, involve more than a single EBCC project.
The options to collaborate with ENETWILD/EFSA were also discussed. In fact, a meeting with these organizations was going to take place on April 9th (also at Bird Numbers 2019) in order to explore a possible collaboration in the framework of the EFSA initiative to collate and analyze spatial and temporal distribution information on wild birds relevant to Avian Influenza in Europe.
Finally, it was stressed that the EBP should define which are the specific products that could realistically deliver in the short/mid term since this would be essential when seeking the proper funding/collaboration at the EU level.
The Russian colleagues gave a short talk about their online bird portal: ru-birds
Shortly after the general EBP meeting, on April 10th, eight persons participated in the fifth meeting of the LIFE EBP coordination team.
