The 21st EBP meeting and a LIFE EBP Reinforcement workshop brought together 36 participants from 18 countries

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 to 30 October 2024, and was held in the building of the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism. Our Montenegrian partners, CZIP, took care of the logistics. 

The first day was dedicated to the regular EBP meeting, where Gabriel Gargallo, the EBP project coordinator, presented the last advances of the EBP project. After that, 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 an update on the work done within the Bird Flu Radar presented by Ruud Foppen from SOVON.

We used the second day to discuss specific work tasks and activities related to the LIFE project in more detail. 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 had managed to exceed the number of pre-set ICP plots for the given year, and the session ended with a fruitful discussion of the partners’ experience in 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 of the state of the connectivity of all EBP partners regarding the update on including the data for all bird species occurring 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 path to making this connection by 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. We provided an overview of the questions on sensitive species partners answered in advance and a proposal for dealing with them within the EBP project, followed by an open discussion.

The last day was dedicated to concluding the workshop on the Regional Dynamization Campaign (RDC) by finalising the campaign proposal and setting up final dates. The first part of the workshop was held online 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, producing many interesting discussions and conclusions that were much needed for the progress of the EBP project.

Marina Kipson and Gabriel Gargallo

This project is funded by LIFE programme.