ALARM

- Assessing LArge-scale environmental Risks with tested Methods

The ALARM project has grown from a number of smaller teams of scientists, many of whom cooperated earlier. Through personal contacts, the teams started to cooperate on the common project and were able to reach goals that would otherwise not been possible with smaller groups of researchers. Thus, the main activity was gathering people that were able to create an interdisciplinary team as only such approach allowed for breaking traditional borders between disciplines and specialities. Clearly, we were successful in promoting this idea as the project has been finally granted and officially started in February 2004. The outline of the whole project as well as tasks of the teams from the Jagiellonian University are briefly described below.

Based on a better understanding of terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, ALARM will develop and test methods and protocols for the assessment of large-scale environmental risks in order to minimise negative direct and indirect human impacts. Research will focus on assessment and forecast of changes in biodiversity and in structure, function, and the dynamics of ecosystems. This relates to ecosystem services and includes the relationship between society, economy, and biodiversity. In particular, risks arising from climate change, environmental chemicals, biological invasions, and pollinator loss in the context of current and future European land use patterns will be assessed.

We have an increasing amount of case studies on the environmental risks subsequent to each of these impacts. This yields an improved understanding on how these act individually and affect living systems. However, the knowledge on how they act in concert is poor and ALARM will be the first research initiative with the critical mass needed to deal with such aspects of combined impacts and their consequences. Risk assessments in ALARM will be hierarchical and examine a range of organisational (genes, species, ecosystems), temporal (seasonal, annual, decadal) and spatial scales (habitat, region, continent) determined by the appropriate resolution of current case studies and databases. Socio-economics as a cross-cutting theme will contribute to the integration of driver-specific risk assessment tools and methods and will develop instruments to communicate risks to biodiversity end users, and indicate policy options to mitigate such risks.

The ALARM consortium combines the expertise of 53 partners from 26 countries (21 EU, Israel, Switzerland, and 3 INCO states). ALARM encompasses 7 SMEs as full partners with central responsibilities and with a share of >10% of the project resources. Total project costs are €16.7 Million, with a requested EC contribution of €12 Million.

Two research groups from the Institute of Environmental Sciences, Jagiellonian University, participate in the ALARM project. The Department of Behavioural Ecology, led by Prof. Michał Woyciechowski, deals with pollinators loss due environmental changes such as habitat fragmentation, shifts in land-use, climate change and pollution ("Pollinator loss" module). The Department of Ecotoxicology, led by Prof. Ryszard Laskowski, works on biodiversity loss due to anthropogenic pollution ("Environmental chemicals" module). Both groups cooperate closely with a number of research teams all over Europe on the extensive research site network. Besides direct cooperation by using common study areas, exchanging materials, developing common analytical techniques, and others, an extensive training activity has already started. The training aims at two primary goals: standardizing methods and techniques in the ALARM project itself and even more importantly, spreading knowledge among all participating institutions and countries.

Professor Ryszard Laskowski

Institute of Environmental Studies