Small scale pilot on the island of Cres
The second week of July 2024, researchers from COEVOLVERS visited the island of Cres, which represents one of our small-scale pilot programme.
Cres is one of the Adriatic islands located entirely within the ecological network Natura 2000, representing a very significant reservoir of biodiversity resulting from a thousand-year interaction between man and nature. It is home to the griffon vultures (A078 Gyps fulvus) protected under the Birds Directive, indigenous sheep (Cres sheep) breaded since medieval times in the open air, surrounded by historical handmade stone walls – whose building method is considered a UNESCO heritage as a typical example of High-Value Nature Farming.
Ageing population, tourism intensification, overpopulation of non-native animals are key challenges to the sustainability of the traditional pastoral farming system. The aim and hope of the Cres pilot study is to co-design governance practices for the island’s multispecies management that could lead to a just and sustainable co-existence of diversified human and more-than-human actors.
Tatiana Kluvánková (IFE SAS), Juha Hiedanpaa and Jani Pellikka (LUKE), and Martin Špaček and Jiří Louda (CETIP) from the COEVOLVERS team accepted the invitation of our advisory board member Ugo Toić (OTRA) with a request to transfer the experience and knowledge about nature-based solutions from the COEVOLVERS project to the environment of the island.
The actual trip to the island was preceded by several months of preparations, which also included a questionnaire among key local actors to learn various positions towards the multispecies management of the island. The preparations culminated in a co-creation workshop entitled Multispecies management on Cres, which took place on Tuesday, July 9 in the town of Cres. A total of 15 stakeholders participated in the workshops, who, in the first part, discussed the main challenges the ecosystem faces on the island, and then in the second part they discussed the possible solutions. Many thanks to the members of the Island Development Agency (OTRA) for preparing the workshop, especially Ugo Toić, who provided the premises and also invited all the participants.
In the following days after the workshop, there were several internal and external meetings to verify the results and to plan the next steps. Moreover, a total of three excursions were organized throughout the island, where the team leaders were shown some of the most important challenges of the island with regard to multispecies management, as well as some already implemented solutions. It was thus possible to see the current problems with uncultivated pastures being overgrown by junipers, the destruction of traditional stone walls by wild boars, the difficulties faced by local hunters in impermeable terrain, or challenges in protecting griffon vultures. Our guides, Ugo Toić, Frano Toič, and Ivo Saganić, explained the detailed context of the current situation and also answered our questions.
Our work will continue in the following weeks and months jointly working on a multispecies management plan and the Cres study will also be presented at the COEVOLVERS’s workshop Beskydy 2024
