Wednesday 17 February 2010

RACEing ahead (as Mat likes to say)

Yes, the European Bd project is having it's second meeting. Aside from the rather kitch Star Trek allegories, the meeting is extremely informative. Highlights include updates on the Swiss surveillance and mitigation projects, Jaime's work on Iberian endangered species, temporal patterns of Bd infection in adult toads and the Mallorcan mitigation project and a fantastic experiment by Emilien and Sandrine from Lyon examining the interaction between experimental Bd challenge and host population isolation. Currently we are in the midst of a spatialepidemiology.net workshop, led by David and Chris, learning how to real time our data into the European (and, by extension, the global) d-base. Our EU network grows: we have at a minimum another ten active Bd research groups in Europe, and several others readying themselves for initiating projects. At least 5 new PhDs in Europe working on Bd!

While it's clear that field projects in France have some time before starting (we are meeting in Grenoble and the snow and temperature are clear indicators of that), we are gearing up for field work at some of the warmer locales. Jaime will soon start another Iberia-wide field trip, interrupted by a collaborative project with Judit Voros (sorry, Judit, no idea how to do umlauts in Blogger) in Hungary, and Jon Bielby and I should be heading to Sardinia soon to continue our collaborative project with Zirichiltaggi and Ente Foreste Sarda.

A challenge to our North American counterparts: start blogging!

1 comment:

Dirk S. Schmeller said...

Surely, Trents post already shows: 2010 will be a busy year for RACErs. Baseline data will be collected, experiments done, and survey networks extented. France will try to catch up to the rest of the world, to fill all the white spots on Bd knowledge in France and some of it's DOMs.