Yesterday, the European Commission and the international consortium of the PLUS Change project signed a Grant Agreement for the solution and financing of the Horizon Europe programme project. The PLUS Change project – “Participatory land use strategy: in line with biological diversity, with climate and social goals in a changing world” coordinated by Professor Julia Leventon of the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences – CzechGlobe responds to the need to achieve a change in land use so that it is climate neutral, sustainable and biologically diverse. At the same time, these changes must contribute to securing the production of food and non-food commodities and support socio-economic developments that require changes in behavior and decision-making.
Today, our colleague Karel Staník received the award “Letter of Gratitude of the CAS”. Karel has been working as a research technician at our institution for 22 years. He was at the birth of CzechGlobe and has been helping to build it and has been growing with it since its first moments. He was one of those who had to largely improvise when assembling the first devices, participated in the construction of the first ecosystem stations as well as in the final development of the CzechGlobe stations in Vietnam and Ghana. His professional reputation also puts him in the role of a consultant to our foreign partners. Karel is not only a technician with a capital T and a respected colleague, but also a close friend to many of us. We heartily congratulate him on the award!
The Czech Republic has become a founding partner country of the European research infrastructure ACTRIS ERIC, which was established by the decision of the European Commission as of April 25, 2023. The Czech Republic is represented by the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute, the RECETOX center of Masaryk University, the Institute of Chemical Processes Fundamentals of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Mongabay, a news web portal dedicated to nature conservation, published an interview with Dr. Bikram Shrestha of the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who is leading the snow leopard research in Nepal. It was he and his team who were the first in 2004 to confirm the presence of the snow leopard in the lower elevations of Mustang District. During his doctoral studies, he conducted extensive field research of this big cat in the Annapurna and Mount Everest regions, using camera traps and DNA analysis obtained from scat.
CzechGlobe together with seven other institutions from six Central European countries (Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland) launched the Clim4Cast project supported by the Interreg CE programme on March 1. The project will focus on improving forecasts of extreme meteorological phenomena, which in this region are mainly droughts, heat waves and fires.