Biodiversity at CCMESI has been built project by project. Each completed study left something behind: a protected area on the map, a monitoring method that others adopted, a dataset that informed the next generation of research, or a peer-reviewed paper that shaped European debate on conservation.
Our completed projects fall into a few connected strands. Large carnivore ecology ran through the Carpathians for nearly two decades, covering brown bear movement and habitat selection, wolf and lynx conservation, and the trophic relationships that link them. Systematic conservation planning translated species and habitat data into spatial priorities for Romania’s Natura 2000 network. Invasive species management supported national implementation of EU Regulation 1143/2014 and examined how invasive plants move through the landscape. Protected area governance used social network analysis to show how Natura 2000 sites, grasslands, and management bodies actually work in practice. Urban wildlife explored the social and landscape drivers of human-animal coexistence in cities, a newer direction that carried the team toward its current work. Fieldwork in the Iron Gates anchored much of this, with repeated studies of habitats, species, and landscape change in southwest Romania. Alongside these, the team developed freshwater fish conservation within the EU LIFE programme and methods for wildlife population estimation in data-poor systems.
Taken together, these projects trained a generation of researchers, produced more than two hundred peer-reviewed publications, and laid the groundwork for the team’s current focus on participatory conservation planning and human-wildlife coexistence.
Browse the full list below, or return to Biodiversity for the team’s current work.