As EuropaBON – an ambitious project to design an EU-wide framework for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services – is slowly reaching its conclusion, the project partners, along with some key stakeholders and advisory board members gathered for the EuropaBON final workshop. The event took place between 14-17 November in Leipzig, Germany at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv).
With over 30 participants physically present and nearly 20 joining online, the workshop served as a platform to deliberate on the remaining tasks of EuropaBON, addressing both the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Consortium and Advisory Board members, alongside key stakeholders from across Europe, eagerly reviewed the project’s significant milestones achieved during the past three years.
A pivotal aspect of the discussions centred around finalising the EBV workflows, the co-design of the system, the cost-benefit analysis of a EuropaBON, the cross-cutting policy assessments of biodiversity, and the European Biodiversity Monitoring Coordination Centre (BMCC). Project partners and advisory board members gathered on the last day of the workshop to discuss the way forward, including the maintenance of EuropaBON’s incredible members network beyond the lifespan of the project, the upcoming stakeholder conference and high-level policy event in Brussels planned for next year, and ways to successfully disseminate EuropaBON’s outputs and results.
Finally, the workshop presented a unique opportunity to actively engage with and find synergies with other key EU projects, such as B-Cubed, MAMBO, MARCO-BOLO, and others. Noteworthy was the engaging presentation by the coordinator of the eLTER project, Dr. Michael Mirtl, explaining the methodology behind the project’s network of monitoring sites and illustrating opportunities for collaboration between the two initiatives.
Please find the detailed agenda of the meeting here. Slides presented at the workshop are available on request to info@europabon.org.
