EnvEurope Workshop
The first national workshop “Monitoring and analyses of environmental data”, organized by the EnvEurope project of the National LTER-Bulgaria center of IBER and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences took place on June 30, 2011 in Sofia.
The main objective of the meeting was to survey the institutions, the available data and the state-of-art of the environmental monitoring activities in Bulgaria. In the meeting participated representatives of the eigth institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, i.e. National Institute of Geophysics, Geography and Geodesy, National Institute of Hydrology and Meteorology, Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, Institute of Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, Institute for Geology, Institute of Oceanology, Institute of Space Research and Institute of Forest Research, Other participants were the Sofia University, University of Forestry, Sofia, Executive Agency for Soil Resources, many scientists and guests. The workshop was attended also by representatives of the Environmental Executive Agency and the Ministry of Education and Science.
The presentations and discussions took place in three thematic working panels:
- Panel 1 – Organisation of environmental monitoring, monitoring programs, databases, networks and data access.
- Panel 2 – Environmental data analyses: capacity, institutions, research, modeling and reporting.
- Panel 3 – Global change and its consequences: monitoring of global change and its effects, data, research and coordination of activities.
The participant evaluated highly the work of institutions and researchers in gathering and hosting high quality environmental monitoring data. During the discussions the need for better coordination and co-operation in the gathering and utilization of environmental data for research and prognoses was also stated. The need for rules and better access to monitoring data was also discussed.
In was proposed that an initiative has to be started directed towards the development of high quality infrastructure for organization and hosting in appropriate information environment of monitoring and research data in Bulgaria, so that they could be better accessed and used in trans-disciplinary research and modeling. It was suggested that the acronym of the initiative remains MONALISA (MONitoring and anaLISes).