The University of Salento (www.unisalento.it) is a medium size public university with the aim of higher education and scientific and technological research. It has eight Departments covering scientific and humanistic faculties and being responsible of master and PhD programs in the thematic areas of their pertinence. The Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies (DiSTeBA) promotes and coordinates research activities in the field of ecological and environmental sciences, among others, and offers indoor and outdoor research facilities through its field stations, field experimental sites (i.e., the Acquatina lagoon), observatories and indoor physical infrastructures. Its ecology-unit group has experience of coordination of international projects and represents the Department in national and European consortia and centres of competence, international initiatives and European network of excellence. The ecology-unit is also representing the University in LifeWatch, the European e-science infrastructure on biodiversity and ecosystem research, whose Service Centre, a component of the headquarters on the infrastructure is hosted by the University and operates through the ecology-unit.
Principal investigator:
Alberto Basset is Full Professor of Ecology at the University of Salento. His main research interests are in the field of population and community ecology, focusing on biodiversity organisation and ecosystem functioning with the most recent researches on biodiversity organisation, conservation and management in transitional water ecosystems, particularly lagoons. He has published more than 100 ISI papers. He has been served in the Boards of many scientific Societies, being one of the founder and former President of both the Italian Network of Lagoon Research and the Euro-Mediterranean Lagoon Federation. He is currently President of the Italian Society of Ecology and vice-President of the Ecological European Federation, member of the Board of Director of the ESFRI LifeWatch, co-leader of the component 2 of the GEO-Ecosystem task and member of the Scientific Committee of the Ecosystem Red Listing Initiative. He has also different editorial responsibilities in the board or as associated or in chief editor of Scopus/ISI journals.
In Ecopotential he is leader (ad interim) of WP12 (Capacity building and knowledge exchange).