A lot of interesting things happened last month in LIFEstockProtect, thus, we want to share the news with you! In October, besides another exciting trip to Majella National Park, first meetings on the different A actions were initiated, data collection started, and our website is finally also available in Italian.
Please also read: News update: first successful weeks
News overview
The European Wilderness Society and EURAC, together with three Austrian shepherds, returned to Majella National Park. The aim of this trip was to exchange experiences with local shepherds about how they implement livestock protection. As the Apennines in Central Italy represent one of the regions in Europe where wolves never disappeared, the exchange about best practices is crucial for similar implementation in the German-speaking region of the Alps. The team visited a sheep and goat farmer who owns more than 1.400 animals that are protected by 24 livestock guarding dogs; a cow farmer who explained how the cows are instinctively dealing with the presence of wolves in the region; and a young couple who just started their own goat farm three years ago. Read all the details of this trip here.
The working group on preparatory action A.2, a stakeholder analysis, consisting of Naturschutzbund Österreich, EURAC, Umweltdachverband Österreich, ELIANTE and BUND Naturschutz Bayern got together for a first online meeting. Experiences where shared by Anna Crimella (ELIANTE), who has performed stakeholder involvement for many years already. A draft template for stakeholder mapping was subsequently developed in collaboration with the other LIFE project LIFEWolfAlps EU. Over the course of the next weeks and months, the partners will continue to develop relevant baseline information to prepare a lobby network plan which will then be used for effective stakeholder engagement.
Naturschutzhunde had a meeting in the beginning of October after an exciting dog training weekend in Ansfelden and organized the administration for the project. Also, they are making great progress in the preparatory action A.5 and A.6. They are collecting detection dog training protocols from other organisations and countries, and are assessing among relevant stakeholders who is interested to participate in the planned training. Together with VetMedUni Wien, Österreichzentrum Bär, Wolf, Luchs, and ELIANTE, they will look at ways to effectively train scatdog owners to collect scats for genetic analysis further on in the project. Finally, they are organizing an online workshop for Saturday 14th of November, which will give interesting insights into the different uses of detection dogs!
The LIFEstockProtect team of Bavaria, consisting of Bioland Bayern, Bioland Beratung GmbH, BUND Naturschutz Bayern und OPUS, established a weekly online jour fixe meeting to discuss project progress in the region and to tackle the data collection of wolf-livestock depredation, livestock protection impact, the human dimension and legislation for preparatory action A.3.
The European Wilderness Society established effective communication channels through different platforms for all project partners and is in the process of ordering marketing material to be used by all partners throughout the project realization. Together with EURAC, they also updated the project website. It is now available in English, German, and Italian!
Press appearances
October has also been a successful month in terms of press appearances, especially in Italian media! Here is a selection of media platforms that covered the LIFEstockProtect project with a direct link to the article:
