The main topic of our project is «Preserving biodiversity in Europe".The goal of this project is to raise students’ awareness towards the issue of biodiversity by evaluating the actual state of biodiversity in their region and by comparing the tools and means of protection at local levels in different European countries. It aims at reinforcing the communcation and scientific skills.The project should enable our students to open up to different European cultures, heighten their feeling of belonging to the European Union by exchanging ideas and improve their knowledge using English as the common language of communication.The project will take place during 2 years and will include 4 exchanges involving France, Spain, Turkey and Italy.In each country of exchange, we will form a group of 7 students led by one or two teachers, amounting to 92 people directly involved in the project.The students, aged 15 to 17, will come from technological and scientific year 11 (seconde) and year 12 (première).They will commit to host a foreign student at their partners’ arrival in their own country and will have to show themselves interested and motivated by the project.During the first two exchanges, in France and Spain, some groups composed of students from the different countries will have to determine organisms from a river upstream and downstream their school’s location in order to compare the state of the biodiversity between the two rivers and the impact of human activity over this biodiversity.During the two following exchanges, in Italy and Turkey, a survey about the upholding and the reintroduction of species related to the issue of the extension of the wolf’s territory in Europe will be carried out and exploited by the groups of students.During each exchange, we will organize visits of systems and we will meet the people involved in the protection of biodiversity (natural history museums, nature reserves, university institutes, industries). The various pieces of information collected during the visits, the results and exploitation of the river inventories as well as the results of the survey and their analysis will be used to create awareness boards for the protection of biodiversity. These boards will be shown in the different schools involved in the project as well as in other places (town halls, tourist information centres, nature reserve buildings, other schools …) in order to raise awareness among as many and various people as possible and to highlight the use of European exchange projects such as Erasmus +.These boards will remain available after the project for further exhibitions and will also be available via the internet on the schools’ websites for the project to carry on.
The purpose of our project "Biodiversity in Europe and the ways to protect it" was to make the students aware of the importance of biodiversity by evaluating the actual state of biodiversity and by comparing the tools used to protect it locally in different European countries. The objective of the project was also to reinforce our students’ communication and scientific skills, make them open up to different European cultures and strengthen their sense of being European. 100 students were involved in this project, aged 15 to 17, together with high school teachers from 4 different countries: France, Italy, Spain, and Turkey. The project was based on 4 meetings which had been scheduled in the application form, each one 7 to 8 days long, including 5 full days of activities on the topic. In chronological order, these meetings took place in France (November 2016), Italy (April 2017), Spain (October 2017) and Turkey (April 218). The dates of the meetings in Spain and Italy had to be changed from what we had originally planned. At least 42 students and their teachers took part in each meeting on the basis of 21 students from the hosting school (organizing the meeting) and 7 students from each of the other schools. Each meeting included field activities, laboratory work, visits and conferences on the theme of biodiversity. Four main topics were studied: • During the French and Spanish meetings, we collected samples of macro invertebrates living in rivers, which are representative of the water quality, and we studied them in laboratory to determinate them; • In Italy, we looked for traces of wolves in a national park to study them in laboratory in order to know more about the extension of some species’ territory; • In parks and reserves located in France, Italy and Turkey, we observed birds to know more about birds’ protection; • In France, Spain and Turkey, we met people working for specialised institutions and we made observations in the field to learn about how vegetal species could be protected and also about agro-ecology; In-between meetings, students and teachers carried on preparatory or summarizing activities. University teachers, researchers and specialists played an important part to ensure the scientific level of the observations and analyses we made during our different meetings. Thanks to all these activities we created 13 panels intended to inform people and raise their awareness about the preservation of biodiversity. We had a two-month extension for this project to organize a fifth meeting in October 2018. During this meeting which gathered most of the participants of the project, we managed to show the students the final panels they had created. From October 2018 on, the panels have been exhibited in the different partner schools. They will also be exhibited in other places such as town halls, tourist offices, nature parks offices and other schools in order to inform as many people as possible about the preservation of biodiversity and highlight the great value of Erasmus + European exchange projects. The teachers had two transnational meetings to discuss the project management: one in September 2016, at the very beginning of the project, to organize the different meetings and decide of the contents of the activities, the other during the complementary meeting with the students in October 2018 to discuss and prepare the final report.