Submitted by PBMS Admin on
Richard Shore, the Principle Investigator for the PBMS, recently organised a workshop on using sentinel bird of prey species for Europe-wide monitoring pesticides and pollutants in the environment. The workshop, held in Thessaloniki in Greece on February 4-6th, was part of the activities of the European Raptor Biomonitoring Facility (ERBF), an EU-funded “European Cooperation in Science & Technology” (COST) action. The main aim of the meeting was to discuss what bird of prey species and species guilds might be suitable candidates for pan-European monitoring of contaminants.
Richard said “Some 30 raptor and wildlife toxicology experts from across Europe attended the workshop. We discussed the main issues in selecting certain species as candidate sentinels. I think we were successful in progressing our development of a framework for pan- European monitoring.”
The outputs from the workshop will form the basis of an ERFB Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM) later this year, be written up in a scientific journal and practical guidelines will be posted on the ERFB website.
