This virtual meeting was hosted by Naturalis Biodiversity Center and took place on Thursday 11 February 2021, 14:30-17:30 CET and Friday 12 February 2021, 14:30-17:15 CET.
The meeting was set up to inform and inspire natural science collections to engage in pan-European contaminant monitoring. The programme was designed as a sequence of fairly rapid presentations, each followed by short Q&A, in order to cover a range of issues including ongoing work within ERBFacility and related work by other initiatives, e.g. DiSSCo, LIFE APEX, and with a view to keeping the meeting as lively as possible.
More specifically, meeting objectives were:
- To share work done towards a distributed European Raptor Specimen Bank (ERSpeB – WG3 Collections Arena), including: review of raptor collections, constraints; development of a raptor specimen database and links with DiSSCo; standards and protocols for collections; and shipping of samples (SESSIONS 2 AND 4).
- To share work done within the context of LIFE APEX elucidating the importance of collections in the systematic use of contaminant data from apex predators for chemicals management (SESSION 3).
- To share state of play on the European Raptor Biomonitoring Scheme (ERBioMS – WGs1&2 Analysis Arena) and European Raptor Sampling Programme (ERSamP – WG4 Field Arena) and consider links between the ERSpeB, ERBioMS and ERSamP to form a coherent ERBFacility (SESSION 5).
- To share work done under ERBFacility on a Proof of Concept study with a focus on the role of collections (SESSION 6).
The meeting presented the following videos:
- PAN-EUROPEAN CONTAMINANT MONITORING IN RAPTORS AND THE ROLE OF COLLECTIONS - see here
- GATHERING, STORING AND PREPARATION OF SAMPLES FOR CONTAMINANT ANALYSIS - see here
SPEAKERS
Speakers included: Prof Erik Smets, Scientific Director, Naturalis Biodiversity Center. ERBFacility Chair, Working Group Leads, Proof of Concept Leads and Mission Holders; LIFE APEX participants including Jaroslav Slobodnik (Director, Environmental Institute Slovakia), Jan Koschorreck (German Environment Specimen Bank, Federal Environment Agency, Germany) and Nikolaos Thomaidis (Professor of Analytical Chemistry, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens); Dimitris Koureas (Coordinator DiSSCo & CIO, Naturalis Biodiversity Center).
PARTICIPANTS
Participants were drawn from our pan-European network and include curators and researchers from natural history museums, environmental specimen banks and other research institutes, ecotoxicologists, laboratory analysts and field ornithologists. Around 100 participants from 28 countries attended the meeting.
For further details, see programme and meeting presentations, below.
The welcome address by Edwin van Huis, Director General, Naturalis Biodiversity Center is available here.
The video presentation by Jorgos Sbokos on international shipping of raptor samples is available here.
CONTACT
Paola Movalli
Lead Working Group 3 Collections, ERBFacility
paola.movalli@naturalis.nl