Fundación Artemisan share project learnings on cover crops...
Last week, FRAMEwork partner Fundación Artemisan had the opportunity to share the tangible impacts of their long-running work on cover crops with an audience of public workers and technicians from sustainability and environmental delegations.
On 10th October, the LIFE Iberconejo project held an event, “Prevention of Rabbit Damage in Agriculture” at the Centro IFAPA Alameda del Obispo in collaboration with the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation and Andalusian Hunting Federation.
Artemisan researcher Gonzalo Varas Romero filled us in on the event:
“The meeting was very interesting. Different people showed the main problems related to the overabundance of rabbits and the different solutions. Cristóbal´s point of view, who has experienced as a farmer before the problem, during and now, was very interesting for everyone. He showed how the cover vegetations implemented in the Framework project had reduced or eliminated the problem. It is important to highlight the connections between different European projects to solve biodiversity problems in Europe.”
Gonzalo is the facilitator of FRAMEwork's Cazadores de Aguilar Farmer Cluster in which Cristobal is the lead farmer.
LIFE Iberconejo is a consortium of Spanish and Portuguese entities working to establish a system for managing rabbit populations in the Iberian Peninsula, where they are a key species for the local ecosystem. Co-financed by the European Commission’s LIFE programme, the project seeks to improve the state of rabbit populations in the region and, at the same time, reduce and even prevent the damage rabbits cause to agriculture.
Hunting organisations and environmental groups are important collaborators in Andalusia, and our colleagues at Artemisan are instrumental in this regional dynamic. Their FRAMEwork-funded research into sustainable hunting management to protect biodiversity has engaged politicians and policy-makers, affecting real change. Artemisan’s relationship with LIFE Iberconejo, who use their data analysis of regional rabbit populations in their databases, is another example of impactful landscape-scale collaboration.
At the event, representatives of Artemisan presented the FRAMEwork project alongside Cristóbal Reina, a farmer and former president of the Aguilar de la Frontera hunting reserve. They shared their success in implementing cover crops to significantly reduce damage caused by rabbits to olive and vineyard crops.
Artemisan will participate in another event with LIFE Iberconejo later this month, discussing the conservation of the mountain rabbit.
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