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After three years of research and fieldwork, the European project ECONNECT comes to a conclusion: the results of the final conference

The closing conference for the ECONNECT project was held in Berchtesgaden, Germany, attended by political representatives of the six Alpine countries, as well as experts and scientific researchers from local and international institutions.  Project team members presented the results of the project, which was one of the first to deal with the issue of Alpine connectivity that applied an integrated and multidisciplinary approach.

The final conference included debates and proposals of significant interest for the protection, improvement and development of ecological connectivity throughout the Alpine range.  “The most important and, in some ways, most surprising result, is that connectivity in the Alps is actually still adequate for many species” stated Dr. Chris Walzer of the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, who is the lead partner of ECONNECT. “But this is precisely why we must be on guard. The connections between Alpine habitats have to be preserved and maintained by wise and farsighted management strategies covering the entire territory and by means of specific tools.” One of the tools developed by ECONNECT researchers is the highly innovative  JECAMI platform. This is a computer-based system for mapping ecological barriers and corridors that allows users to view the potential migration routes of a given species, and thus to take them into account during regional land-use planning processes in order to ensure their protection.

Some of the other tangible results are the actions put in place in the seven pilot regions of the project.  ECONNECT has provided a concrete contribution for protecting the ecological linkages in these regions, as can be seen by what has happened in the Maritime Alps Natural Park.  Most importantly, apart from implementing a system for monitoring the cables of ski-lifts and cable cars, the research performed for ECONNECT by the Park’s staff made it possible to alert the public authorities involved to the existence of an important wildlife migration corridor in an area where a construction project had been planned, which was stoppedas a result.

Another striking result of the ECONNECT project is that the most significant barriers which have to be overcome for achieving effective international collaboration on ecosystem protection are cultural. ECONNECT has been an important opportunity for discussing and developing solutions for these issues from a broader perspective, thus moving ahead in the direction of creating ecological connectivity in the Alps.  Among the results achieved, perhaps the most straightforward is the sharing of environmental data throughout Europe to support research activities. Sharing of environmental data across the Alps is an essential precondition for effective transnational collaboration on biodiversity conservation.