Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation 2023 Prize awarded to two projects
The Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation Award 2023, in the area of Conservation, restoration and monitoring of biodiversity in Portugal, is the result of a partnership between FCT and the Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation and will distinguish two projects, selected after evaluating the 44 applications received.
First place was awarded to the project “CCforBio – Conservation corridors in woodlands: A win-win for biodiversity, wood production, and carbon sequestration“, which will receive €207,698.00 in funding and whose Principal Investigator, Bruna Raquel Figueiredo Oliveira, is from the University of Aveiro. This project aims to demonstrate the value of conservation corridors in production forests by restoring a riparian gallery in the Matas Nacionais das Dunas de Quiaios (MNDQ), on the coast of Portugal, which burned down in 2017 and is currently dominated by the invasive species Acacia longifolia.
In second place was the project “Barrocal-Cave: Conservation, monitoring and restoration assessment of the world-class cave biodiversity hotspot in Portugal”. The funding awarded is €163,883.00 and the lead researcher, Ana Sofia Pereira Serrenho Reboleira, belongs to FCiências.ID – Associação para a Investigação e Desenvolvimento de Ciências. The main challenge of this project is the conservation of the Vale Telheiro Cave, located in the Barrocal area of the Algarve, which has recently been recognized as a world hotspot for underground biodiversity. The aim is to create useful information for the protection of the cave, as well as a framework for its future ecological assessment, guaranteeing its sustainability; in addition, a proposal for a legal framework for the protection of the habitat and the most relevant species is also planned.
The financial support to be granted to the two winning projects totals €371,581.00 and each of the Foundations will fund 50% of the total prize.
The partnership between the Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation (FBA) and the FCT was established through Regulation no. 848/2023, published in the Diário da República, 2nd Series on August 3, 2023, and aims to provide financial support for “Conservation, restoration and monitoring of biodiversity in Portugal” projects up to a total amount of five hundred thousand euros.
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