Kick-off from the Biodiversa/Belmont Forum call

Kick-off from the Biodiversa/Belmont Forum call

The asteroid is uswas the expression in New York Times last weekend when referring to the currently ongoing mass extinction from plants and animals on earth.

During the last three days, Simone and Romina attended workshops and the official kick-off from the Biodiversa/Belmont Forum COFUND Call on “Scenarios of Biodiversity and ecosystem services” in Helsinki. We met PI’s and members from 20 other projects in the program and who presented their planned research. A brochure on all our projects was published alongside.

Here I highlight 3 sister-projects which are interesting to us for potential future collaborations:

  • Land2Sea coordinated by Tasman Crowe will work on freshwater and coastal biodiversity with case studies from which three are very close to ours: Bohuslän in Sweden, Elbe estuary in Germany, and St. Lawrence stream in Canada.
  • In the project BONDS coordinated by Marie-Paule Bonnet, the Amazonian wetlands are investigated through remote sensing to estimate their phytoplankton activity.
  • Working with protected areas, the project ENVISION coordinated by Christopher Raymond, plans a similarly inclusive stakeholder process as we do and we hope to explore further synergies with our common colleague Erik Andersson at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Further projects will employ methods similar to us such as agent-based modelling on viticulture (Nina Schwarz in SECBIVIT), dynamical systems modelling in coral reefs (Steven Lade in REEF-FUTURES), or participatory scenario development on farming practices in Malawi (Rachel Bezver Kerr in FARMS4Biodiversity). We are looking forward to learn from the crowd of people engaged with all these projects in the next 3 years how we can join forces to safeguard biodiversity and therewith our common basis of life.

Just around the corner from our venue in Helsinki.

Finally, we want to thank the team from Biodiversa and Belmont Forum for preparing and moderating an engaging program for us!