Palma de Mallorca, 9 February 2007

Europe needs a large-scale biodiversity research infrastructure to live up to the challenges of sustainability and competitiveness. Biodiversity experts from all over Europe shared experiences this week on how they cooperate to achieve this aim. ECNC participated in this event to ensure that biodiversity research meets policy requirements.

Over 150 experts met in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, during a week-long conference of the ALTER-Net network (A Long-Term Biodiversity, Ecosystem and Awareness Research Network) to review progress of the past three years and to prioritize the network’s activities for the next two years. “ALTER-Net is an important flagship project that helps overcome the current wasteful fragmentation of European biodiversity research capacity.” said Martin Sharman, research policy officer of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research. It brings together biodiversity data, experts, disciplines, institutes and information systems with the aim to provide knowledge for European policy development and implementation. It also supports the international objective of halting biodiversity loss by 2010 and it is an essentail step towards building the necessary large-scale biodiversity research infrastructure.

ECNC presented its work on developing a policy-science interface for ALTER-Net and the wider biodiversity community. An important component of this is ECNC’s role in organizing the Network Advisory Committee with representatives of key European and international policymakers and end users. Another cornerstone of the science-policy interface will be a hotline that will allow stakeholders to retrieve knowledge from the ALTER-Net community. This idea was welcomed by the Advisory Committee and will be further developed in the coming years.

More on ALTER-Net: www.alter-net.info