Online Conference on “Road ecology & Citizen Science: Environmental education through roadkill observation systems”

The Open University of Cyprus (OUC) hosts an online conference, open to academics, researchers, technocrats and the public, in the context of the European research project “EnVeROS - Environmental Education through Roadkills Observation Systems”. The Conference, entitled “Road ecology & Citizen Science: Environmental education through roadkill observation systems” will be held on December 8 and 9, 2020. In addition to presentations and workshops, Professor Helen Elizabeth Roy of the UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology, and Wendy Collinson-Jonker, Manager of the Wildlife and Transport Program of the NGO Endangered Wildlife Trust in South Africa, will give keynote talks on “Engaging people in wildlife recording” and “Using citizen sciences to survey roadkill at wide spatio-temporal scales” respectively.

In the context of the Conference, representatives of the research institutions that implement EnVeROS will present the project’s outcomes to date, the aim of which is to raise public awareness and educate about the Wildlife Vehicle Collision (WVC) situation and to actively involve the public in Roadkill data collection through a citizen science approach. Best practices for mitigating the phenomenon of roadkills in the regions involved in EnVeROS, i.e. Cyprus, Italy and the Czech Republic, will be discussed to consider their wider application in other countries.

The conference will be broadcasted live through the OUC e-learning tools. The live stream URL is:  https://tinyurl.com/y5qqo2od.

Participants, who will register HERE until December 7, will be given a certificate of attendance.

PROGRAMME OF THE CONFERENCE

The EnVeROS project, that is coordinated by the OUC Terrestrial Ecosystem Management Laboratory and its Director, Professor Ioannis Vogiatzakis, MSc in "Environmental Conservation and Management", aims at a) mitigating the phenomenon of roadkills, which mainly affects biodiversity and the environment, and secondarily human society with health and safety impacts, b) raising public awareness on the severity of WVC and allowing for the development of a public mass movement to combat the issue, through the creation of an interactive database for WVC populated with citizen science data, and c) mobilizing and training relevant stakeholders to directly contribute in scientific research on the WVC subject through citizen science and crowdsourcing. The project is funded under the Erasmus+ programme and OUC’s partners are the research centers of Accademia Europea Di Bolzano - EURAC in Italy, the Centrum Dopravniho Vyzkumu V.V.I. –CDV in the Czech Republic, and “Terra Cypria, the Cyprus Conservation Foundation”.

More information about EnVeROS may be found on the project’s website: https://www.enveros.eu/