The 2012 Annual BES meeting was hosted by University of Birmingham, Birmingham (UK), and attracted ecologists in a range of areas in academia, education, policy and public engagement. The annual meeting was set around a number of sessions and thematic topics, as well as more informal groups organized for training, research and sharing experiences about ecological science. In order to promote the visibility of the consortium’s activities and its funding opportunities for the UK scientist community in particular, BiodivERsA actively participated to this meeting in two ways:
- An oral presentation “BiodivERsA, Promoting the pan-European dimension of biodiversity research” by Xavier Le Roux (coordinator) emphasized the benefit of integrating resources and programmes at European scale to address cross-borders biodiversity issues. The success of BiodivERsA’s joint calls was further illustrated by presenting a selected number of funded projects, their scientific novelty and European added value. Other key achievements of the consortium – including the shared and updated biodiversity research agenda between partners, and the database mapping European biodiversity research – were also highlighted.
- A poster presentation “The BiodivERsA database: a webportal to identify resources and network opportunities for biodiversity research” by Hilde Eggermont (BELSPO, WP5 leader), setting out the main objectives and current status of the BiodivERsA database (to be launched March 2013)
Finally, the meeting also provided the opportunity to learn about new results coming from projects funded by the 2008 call, facilitating the dissemination of these outcomes in forthcoming policy briefs.
