The first ECOPOND Steering Committee Meeting was held on Wednasday, the 20th of January 2021.
Steering Committee is the ultimate decision-making body of the ECOPOND Project Partnership. It has been unanimously agreed that the members of the Committe would be the Principal Investigators and project Partners – investigators representing each ECOPOND Party.
The main subject of the meeting, apart from formal issues and those related to the preparation of the administrative report for 2020, was the selection, from the potential sampling ponds list, of those ponds which will be sampled for research in the spring and summer seasons. It was discussed what selection criteria would be best to apply and what parameters the selected ponds must necessarily meet. The sampling will include pairs of urban and non-urban ponds located in the area of 6 cities: Krakow (PL), Lodz (PL), Gdansk (PL), Goteborg (SE), Oslo (NO), Trondheim (NO).
It has also been definitively confirmed that the two amphibian species which will be the object of study within WP3 are: the common toad (Bufo bufo) and the smooth newt (Lissotriton vulgaris).
The Steering Committee meeting was followed up with a working meeting on Friday, the 29th of January, where the list of sampling ponds was reviewed and further specified taking into consideration, what had been previously agreed.