The year 2020 was a difficult one for ROC-POPLife, which had to severely reduce its field activities due to the lockdown and restrictions imposed by the pandemic. Despite the difficulties, however, all the partners have tried to maintain a high level of attention to the project, continuing the activities on the installations, and promoting the project in all possible forms
Some examples?
Summer activities with children from the summer camps.
In the 12 weeks, 288 children have had the opportunity to try the construction of the clay supports for the repopulation, but also to see the “lanternet” station in the sea which has been prepared for visits; visits were organized not only for children but also for snorkeling visitors.
Snorkelling visits to the installations.
More than 1000 visitors of all ages had the opportunity to see an example of the algae installation that has been prepared in the middle of the visit route.
On the occasion of the ESOF event, a visit module called blueblitz was prepared for the presentation of the monitoring and restoration activities; three types of blitz, one of them was ROC-POPLife and cystoseira.
The module was proposed and realized on the Sundays of August and the first weeks of September which culminated with the ESOF science week.
Scientific cafés
During the week (03/09/2020), was organized an evening conference hosted at the Miramare BIOMA on the theme of restoration and with the collaboration of the University of Trieste were presented the results of ROC-POPLife.
Training days with university students, degree theses, doctorates etc..
Summer school for scientists from UNITS
Restoring the sea? Not the task of architects but of biologists and algologists!
The summer school of the degree course in Ecology of Climate Change at the University of Trieste talked about restoration. Annalisa Salace from Units and Saul Ciriaco from the staff of Area Marina Protetta Miramare presented to the students the ROCPopLife project, funded by the LIFE programme, for the restoration of the Cystoseira algae in the Gulf of Trieste, illustrating the techniques and the partial and encouraging results achieved.
Participation to the Hackathon Genova event on 17 November 2020 (title: Conservazione e restauro di ecosistemi marini vulnerabili; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DtepXFuTq0&feature=youtu.be)
On December 1st, 2020, the results from the restoration efforts carried out in the Miramare MPA in 2019 and from the experiment addressing the effects of temperature on Cystoseira hyblaea (March 2020) were presented at the Scientific Board of the PhD course in Environmental Life Sciences at the University of Trieste.
Participation to the Telethon live stream organized by the High School Ruffini from Imperia on 11 December 2020 (Title: IL ripristino degli ecosistemi marini; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1Rl8Qx-0U4).
In the hope that the new year will allow us to return to effective concrete actions on the donor and recipient sites, for now we will limit ourselves to maintenance actions during the winter season.