AlpsLife

The Alps are a global biodiversity hotspot whose unique ecosystems are facing significant threats from climate change and land-use pressures. Efforts to conserve and restore Alpine biodiversity are often fragmented due to a lack of Alpine-wide coordination and varying biodiversity monitoring schemes across different countries.

The AlpsLife project aims to address these challenges by promoting science-based strategies and establishing a common framework for transnational cooperation. Relying on EU-relevant ecological indicators, AlpsLife ensures the interoperability of biodiversity data from multiple sources and assesses trends to create a shared understanding of biodiversity processes. By testing these indicators on the ground and adjusting them to meet the specific policy needs of Alpine countries, this project enables more effective cross-border management and decision-making to safeguard Alpine biodiversity.

This project is co-funded by the European Union through the Interreg Alpine Space programme and is a partnership across multiple scales and across the Alpine space. These collaborators include scientific institutions such as Eurac Research, Universität Innsbruck, and the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA); the Alpine Network of Protected Areas (ALPARC); CIPRA Lab; and protected areas from various Alpine countries.

The Universität Innsbruck is responsible for collecting and refining high-resolution land-use/land-cover maps, calculating and mapping biodiversity relevant indicators and identifying “urgent-need-to-act” areas in the Alps.