During the PRIDE program we developed a very intense training environment for 15 young researchers (ESRs) as well as for all scientists and participants.
The cross-disciplinary training improved the ESR career perspectives. Our progress resulted from crossing borders, between disciplines, lake basins and the different countries. We are sure that we can only understand and address the Pontocaspian biodiversity crises if we thoroughly integrate scientific understandings across disciplines.
By actively engaging with institutes and researchers from the Pontocaspian region through our partners, we established a strong regional network. This network spans from West to Eastern Europe and beyond, including Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. This (1) makes our projects and results more widely and better supported, (2) gave us the possibility to reach out to the stakeholders in the region to address conservation of endemic species (3) will lead to more follow up projects and programs and (4) will hence increase the future career prospects of our ESRs, (5) will let all involved benefit from this network now and in the future.
Our research led to follow up recommendations to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) for conservation of mollusc species and mitigation of threats.
In this program some ESRs got the opportunity to work with the newest climate models on a supercomputer, bringing new knowledge about different climate change and processes in the Pontocaspian region which have not been studied yet with state-of-the-art climate models. They predict that the Black and Caspian Sea area will rise in temperature of between 3 and 6 degrees in the year 2100 under different future climate scenarios. And they predict that the Caspian Sea level will drop 9 to 18 meters by the year 2100. These are new insights. This drop will have a huge impact on biodiversity, humanity and economy in the region.
Data and associated software produced in PRIDE are accessible after publication of the results in peer reviewed journals, and will be made accessible through the PRIDE website, PC-TAX, PC-IS and general systems like GBIF, NCBI's GenBank, Pangea and the IUCN Red list.
The project resulted in 1 PhD defended, and 12 planned in the near future. 5 ESRs already found high level jobs, for example with the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, and the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK, a Dutch Marine Consultancy company. We are happy to see that they are in areas of research and protection of the natural environment.