Last April 24th, we received at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona the visit of Sara Barceló, the LIFE medCLIFFS external monitor from ELMEN (a contracted entity by the European Commission which supports the LIFE program in tasks supervision). During the visit the following people were present: from the CSIC (Arnau Bosch and Sònia Garcia), from the MCNB (Neus Ibáñez and Neus Nualart), from the “Diputació de Girona” (Maria Guirado), from the Natural Park of Cap de Creus [PNCC] (Joan Bech), from the Federation of Nurseries in Catalonia [FVC] (Josep Maria Pagès and Meritxell Fibla), from the association Flora Catalana (Francesc Caralt) and the addition of Roser Melero (previous project manager) and Edgard Mestre (documentalist of the IBB Herbarium) as guests.
The morning session started at 10:15 at the IBB Meeting Room, and after a brief presentation of the project, the representative of the partners and those responsible for the different actions explained their tasks and updated their status to the monitor and the rest of the attendants. Among other topics we treated: (1) the new organization of coordination of the project due to the staff recent changes, (2) the monitoring tasks status and methodology (in particular for the threatened species Limonium tremolsii, Limonium geronense and Seseli farrenyi), (3) the development progress of risk maps for the most important invasive species, (4) the volunteering status associated to the project and its progress, (5) how the relationships with the owners of private properties with invasive species are evolving, and the status of the different modalities of eradication actions (manual, chemical and biological), (6) the evolution of the white list and the code of conduct (currently in press), (7) the new methodology for ecosystem services assessment, and (8) all the activities linked to the communication and diffusion of this project. During the session, Sara Barceló asked questions to clear doubts and also proposed some suggestions to improve different tasks of the project.
Just before the lunch break, we said goodbye to our manager Roser Melero, who had to leave the project and thanked her for an excellent job from the first day of the LIFE medCLIFFS project.
After lunch, we continued with the communication and networking topics, as well as the arrangement of the exploitation and replication plan of the project. We also discussed the financial and administrative organization of the project, and Sara Barceló solved questions related to the next mid-term report submission and other mandatory documentation. The IBB manager, Ángela Zárate, attended the financial discussion as well, providing some insight into the economic part.As a final touch to the visit, two days later, on April 26th, we visited the clearing-work zones in Cap de Creus with Sara Barceló. From Barcelona went Arnau Bosch, Neus Nualart, Edgard Mestre and Sònia Garcia. We met with Sara Barceló, Josep Maria Pagès (FVC), Maria Guirado (DDGI), Joan Bech and Ponç Feliu (PNCC) and Laia Solà (La Sorellona) at the PNCC seat where Ponç showed us a presentation of the park and Laia the educational board games of the project.
Later on, we visited the zones of horizontal works with Carpobrotus spp. as the “Paratge de Tudela”, where there are also the informative panels of the project; zones of biological control against Opuntia spp. by translocation of infected pads (S’Alqueria), zones of vertical works with Carpobrotus spp., where we could also see the problem of several private properties with invasive plants growing in their gardens (Portlligat); and zones of chemical control against Gazania (Caials). We finished all having lunch together in Cadaqués.
Afterwards, on May 11th, Sara Barceló attended the fieldtrip to Sant Feliu de Guíxols in the morning with the team and, in the afternoon, visited the floral ensemble of LIFE medCLIFFS of “Temps de Flors” in Girona (see more information about these events here). We hope that during these days she has gotten a good idea of how our project is evolving!
Text: Sònia Garcia
