30 September 2019
In mid-September Uppsala, land of Vikings and home of Charles Linnaeus, hosted the International workshop on eradication and biosecurity. And PonDerat was there.
The workshop was organized by Biosecurity for LIFE of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), a project aiming to reduce the risk of invasion or re-invasion by predators of the British "Seabird Islands".
Several projects have been invited dealing with the conservation of island biodiversity through the eradication or control of invasive alien species and permanent biosecurity. Experts from eleven different nations met for two intense days.
PonDerat participated with two interventions. The first one was shared with Life Asap (Alien Species Awareness Program). Both projects involve the "Parks team", a tight-knit group of rangers, naturalists and communicators, all coming from Protected Areas of Lazio and from the Department for Natural Capital, Parks and Protected Areas. Fabrizio Petrassi illustrated the advantages of having a working team of trained people capable of transmitting important messages in preventing the spread of invasive alien species. With the second intervention Dario Capizzi illustrated some technical aspects, such as the use of aerial distribution of biodegradable dispensers, used by PonDerat to reach the most inaccessible areas of Ventotene and Palmarola, a technique that aroused a lot of interest and could be adopted also in islands in other parts of the world.
A bit of PonDerat also in a third intervention, the one by Paolo Sposimo of Nemo srl (our partner), who showed the excellent results of the Resto con life project. He presented the activities still in progress in Montecristo which, thanks to the eradication completed in 2012, is now the largest rat-free Mediterranean island. Since then, biosecurity measures have been in place and their efficiency has been tested in the field and improved in the last few years.
It was a truly enriching experience with a program that alternated the presentation of the various projects with moments of team working aimed to develop new ideas to take home.
At the conclusion of these two days, we greeted each other with the promise of working more and more in connection with each other, to create a European network of all public and private bodies working to fight invasive alien species on islands.
We thank again the Biosecurity for Life project for the invitation and hospitality, confident that there will be further opportunities for meeting and collaboration.
