Dr. Morelli’s Community Ecology & Conservation team has become a member of an international consortium in the European Commission project called DEVELOPING TOOLS TO SUPPORT FARMLAND BIRD CONSERVATION IN THE EU (reference No.: ENV/2020/OP/0003). The team, with the collaboration of BirdLife Czech Republic, is in charge of overviewing of Conservation Science for Flagship Species. This work package consists of identification of at least 15 unsecure or declining bird species and the collection of the main relevant information for conservation of such 15 flagship species.
Institutions of ten EU states participate on the project: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal and Spain.
Briefly, the new Birds@Farmland initiative of the European Commission supports Member States in conserving wild birds living in agricultural landscapes. Conservation of farmland birds is a Birds Directive obligation that is essential to the success of the EU Green Deal and the Biodiversity and Farm to Fork Strategies. The main importance of the project is its linkage of conservation evidence to implementation in a critical time in terms of the Conservation Activity Plan (CAP). The outputs of the project are expected to have a strong real-world impact, since involving stakeholders from a type of landscape (agro-ecosystems) always in change.
The project is coordinated by the Environment Agency Austria (EAA, Umweltbundesamt GmbH).
The project is schedulled from 2021 to 2022 and finantially suported by the EC with total bugdet of 13,000,000 CZK.