An initiative titled “Biodiversity Program,” sponsored by Switzerland and launched on Wednesday, will provide funding for four years of work to improve wildlife monitoring and the effectiveness of biodiversity protection in protected areas in Estonia.
The funding agreement signed by the two countries will see 6.93 million Swiss francs, or more than seven million euros, provided towards nature protection in Estonia. As part of the initiative, the Estonian Environment Agency and the Environmental Board will develop innovative wildlife monitoring methods and assess the performance of protected areas when preparing new management plans for protected natural objects and new species conservation action plans.
Antti Tooming, deputy secretary general of the Ministry of Climate for biodiversity and environmental protection, said the Swiss assistance will enhance knowledge on Estonian wildlife, enabling better decisions for nature protection.
“Nature monitoring, conservation measures, and the enhancement of conservation management will gain new momentum. The planning process for nature conservation will become more efficient; when updating conservation management plans, we will evaluate the necessity of restrictions and add to the plans new themes such as connections to green networks and the role of nature in mitigating climate change,” Tooming said, adding that the work is to be done over the next four years.
As a result, the administrative burden will be reduced and the state’s capacity to carry out the necessary monitoring and research will improve. Besides, the updated plans will speed up the process of issuing permits.
Officials say that modern technologies can help make monitoring more effective and further improve data quality.
“Examples include environmentalDNA, mobile 3D bird radar, the use of artificial intelligence and so on. This program provides an excellent opportunity to test different solutions and deploy them for wildlife monitoring. We also plan to make data processing and management faster and more efficient, whereas it is also important to ensure the integrity of existing data sets and the comparability of new data with data from previous periods,” said Taimar Ala, director of the Environment Agency.
Source: BNS
(Reproduction of BNS information in mass media and other websites without written consent of BNS is prohibited.)