The Big Mosquito Bytes project has been awarded a million euros by the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation. The project will combine citizen science and other massive data sources to develop innovative models that allow predicting the risk of epidemics, as well as visualizing this risk in real time. In the project led by CEAB-CSIC, scientists from UPF, the Max Planck Institute for Demography, the National Center for Epidemiology of ISPCIII and CREAF participate, and it draws heavily on the Mosquito Alert citizen science platform.

The future does not look bright for the Montseny brook newt, according to an article published recently in the journal Ecology and Evolution. Led by CREAF and the Spanish National Research Council’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Blanes (CEAB-CSIC), the study on which the article reports concludes that climate change and alterations to vegetation cover in Montseny Natural Park are a threat to the newt’s long-term survival.

Since 2015, the Medecc network, with more than 80 scientists from all over the Euro-Mediterranean region, has been producing this pioneering and innovative report which is the largest scientific assessment of climate and environmental change at regional level in the Mediterranean.

The CREAF ecologist has participated in a series of interviews by the English journal Functional Ecology to researchers from all over the world to learn about their experiences during the PhD and to understand how it works in each country.

Monitoring progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires a huge amount of data. Citizen science could help fill important data gaps according to a new study published in  Nature Sustainability. The research, led by IIASA, has involved a large community of citizen science experts from around the world, including Joan Masó, a researcher at CREAF. 

A study led by CREAF has found that new forests growing on abandoned rural land are able to capture more carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere than long-established forests. This effect could be temporary, however, as the wood of their trees is less dense, making them more vulnerable to extreme climate events.

Polyfarming is a regenerative agriculture project that combines forest resources, livestock and crops to recover a fertile soil in Mediterranean mountain areas. The project, co-financed by the European Commission's LIFE program, is led by the CREAF and the Planeses farm, where it is carried out on a real scale.

In its application, CREAF proposed a strategic research plan for generating knowledge to help tackle the 21^st century’s main environmental problems, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Following rigorous international evaluation, CREAF has been chosen for accreditation on the basis of its scientific results and strategic programmes.

Cities across Europe and China are preparing to green themselves. The Sino-European project Clearing House was officially launched and will be expanding the knowledge of trees and forests in urban areas.

With a view to improving access to and the availability and use of geospatial data, the intergovernmental partnership GEO (Group on Earth Observations) has this year established a GEO Associate membership category for organizations based anywhere in the world and related to such data. CREAF recently became one of the first six GEO Associates.