Last 17th and 18th of May, LIFE Scrubsnet project partners held their first project monitoring meeting in the city of Mérida (Extremadura, Spain). Jesús Moreno, General Director of Sustainability of the Regional Government of Extremadura, together with Enrique Delgado, Head of Natural Resources Section, welcomed participating entities to the working session, together with Ainhoa Darquistade, Regional Coordinator of NEEMO and Patricia Mora, CEO of Innogestiona Ambiental, the project’s coordinating organisation.
LIFE Scrubsnet project partners are already working on the preparatory actions of the project, through the design of protocols for action, evaluation and monitoring of activities, with specific proposals for intervention in each of the pilot farms, after the visit to each of them.
Once areas of intervention and influence have been identified in the pilot farms, located in Plasencia (Finca Valcorchero), Siruela (Finca comunal), Santa Olalla del Cala (Dehesa San Francisco) and the Portuguese farms Terra de Freiras and Grupo de Sao Mateus in Sitio de Monfurado, the partners organised themselves into different thematic working groups: bush and woodland species, soil and dryness, water, fauna, species monitoring, livestock management, policies and replicability, socio-economic aspects and administrative permissions.
During the meeting, project website was officially launched: https://lifescrubsnet.eu; together with the Communication Plan and the social networks, already up and running. Innogestiona, as coordinator and responsible for the communication activities, will provide timely information on the activities of this LIFE project, in collaboration with 10 partners from Spain, Portugal and Italy: Iberian Ecohabitat Group, Extremadura Verde, IRNAS-CSIC, DG Sustainability -Junta de Extremadura-, Plasencia City Council, SEO BirdLife, University of Cordoba, University of Extremadura, University of Évora and Agris Sardegna, with the collaboration of the Spanish Federation of Dehesa, FEDEHESA.
The agenda of the monitoring meeting was attended by Ainhoa Darquistado, the NEEMO monitor assigned to the project, who followed the presentations of the partners and participated in the discussions on technical actions, censuses, monitoring and evaluation protocols… and went through administrative and financial issues for the proper development of the project.
The LIFE Scrubsnet project is co-financed by the European Union through the LIFE20 NAT/ES/000978 programme.
