A Framework delegation brings farmland biodiversity benefits to a Milan meeting of the IOBC-WPRS...
The IOBC-WPRS is one of six Regional Sections of the International Organisation for Biological Control. IOBC was established in 1955 to promote environmentally safe methods of pest and disease control in plant protection.
Members of WPRS are individual scientists, governmental, scientific or commercial organisations from 24 countries of Europe, the Mediterranean region and the Middle East.
IOBC-WPRS encourages collaboration in promoting feasible and environmentally safe methods of pest and pathogen control
This week, a Framework delegation attended the 9th meeting, hosted by The University Of Milan, and presented the conference with information and data from the project.
Dr Niamh McHugh and Dr Graham Begg presented key objectives and approaches including farmer clusters' roles in data collection on biodiversity and the impact of management techniques.
Framework Project co-ordinator Dr Graham Begg reports:
We were wonderfully hosted by Daniella Lupi and colleagues, and enjoyed several days sharing our latest research and ideas. Pest, disease and weed management continues to be an important focus of the Working Group but this meeting reflected the growing awareness of the need to manage functional biodiversity to tackle a wide range of socio-environmental challenges. There were several presentations addressing the management of biodiversity in cities and a couple of fantastic field visits to experience leading examples of this in Milan.
It was also great to see the FRAMEwork project being well represented at the meeting with which it shares many interests. This included an overview of the project and an introduction to the farmer cluster approach, as well as an example of a cluster in action, and the role being played by citizen science. All of the sessions generated a lot of discussion and debate and as this was the first face to face meeting in some time it was great to continue these over a coffee, while walking in the park, or at the bar.
Diving down from high level objectives and approaches into the projects's data Simone Marini presented an overview of agricultural habitat use by butterflies in Framework's Italian Farmer Cluster. The cluster near Calci Pisa has recently yielded the first set of butterfly monitoring results.
These show all 4 SNH types contributing equally to butterfly abundance and species richness.
SSSA Lead Dr Camilla Moonen notes:
It will be interesting to see whether the pollinator monitoring data continues on this trend! It was great to introduce the project and open up opportunities to develop links and share experiences.
Head to www.iobc-wprs.org for the proceedings of this years' meeting or for details of the next.
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