Wednesday 31 December 2014

Net-Biome 1st Joint Call Mid-Term Conference


The NetBiome mid-term conference took place in Gosier (Guadeloupe) in October (20-21). Project coordinators were present as well as local executives, members of the French funding agency and experts from the initial evaluation panel.


The first day of the meeting was devoted to presentation and discussion about the seven projects funded by the NetBiome call. Coordinators presented the development and current status of their project. Although the process was not an evaluation, presentations were followed by intense discussion about the main achievements, on-going work and plans, as well as the possible difficulties that could be encountered before the end of the project.


MOVECLIM was presented by Olivier Flores.The achievements of the project so far were overall very well perceived and evaluated by the specialist scientists. Among positive aspects, one that was found particularly relevant was that strictly similar protocols were applied by different research teams to sample biodiversity across distinct archipelagoes. The main difficulties that were identified was the delay due to the change in one of the partner and the remaining efforts to be done to identify unprocessed samples and consolidate the datasets. Informal discussions raised great perspectives for a possible continuation of the research programme initiated by the MOVECLIM consortium.
 

Two clearly identified reasons of the relative success of the program are that one post-doc, while being actively implied in the research, was committed to its coordination, and that the program builds on existing similar experience and data in the field.

The following day, the meeting welcomed new attendants interested in the possibility of seeing a second funding call (NetBiome CSA). This day was devoted to exchange and discussion in the form of several workshops. They addressed various topics such as biodiversity indicators specially designed for islands for instance.

During the rest of week, attendants of the NetBiome conference participated to the International Conference on Biodiversity and Climate Change (www.guadeloupe2014.com, 22-25/10). A short subject was shot about MOVECLIM and displayed on the regional news (see the Communication page).



Read more ...