Kick-off meetings for all European LIFE+ Nature & Biodiversity projects

In the first quarter of 2010, kickoff meetings and presentations of the newly starting LIFE+ Nature & Biodiversity projects* (funded under the 2008 campaign) took place all over Europe. With a total of 80 projects in 22 countries and a total budget of 199 million Euros (including 107 million Euros from the EU funds), LIFE+ Nature & Biodiversity projects are probably among the biggest nature and biodiversity preserving funding schemes world-wide[TG1] . These projects are intended to support environmental and nature conservation actions in NATURA 2000 areas throughout the EU and in certain non-EU countries.

As a transnational project, AMIBIO project partners participated in the LIFE08 kick-off meetings in Athens (March 2nd), which brought together fourteen LIFE+ projects from Greece and five from Cyprus, and in Bonn (March 4th), which brought together 17 projects from Germany and 3 from Austria. Among these projects there are two N These meetings provided to all participants the opportunity to get acquainted with the LIFE+ project administration rules and with the LIFE+ management staff as well as with the national monitoring teams within ASTRALE. Along with the other represented projects, AMIBIO had the chance to present the project concept, and to highlight the expected outcomes of the project and their impact on Nature and society. Specifically, with its innovative concept of automatic remote monitoring, AMIBIO (http://www.amibio-project.eu)  will have a lot to offer for a considerable number of other LIFE-projects, many of which are in dire need to monitor exactly the effects of their respective actions on biodiversity within the targeted NATURA 2000 sites. An example is the “Network of Life” project (“Netze des Lebens”: http://www.bund.net/biotopvernetzung), which will create forest corridors of 20,000 km length, connecting important forest habitats for wild cats and other endangered forest species. Here, as in many other cases, acoustic monitoring is an ideal tool to detect the presence of secretive species by their vocalisations.

References

* Nature & Biodiversity Projects 2008, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2009

ISBN 978-92-79-13426-5, DOI: 10.2779/82642. Accessed on-line on March 22, 2010:

URL: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/life/publications/lifepublications/compilations/documents/natcompilation08.pdf