In September 2022, the University of Lodz (UŁ) begins the implementation of the first project from the Horizon Europe program, in which the partner is the Vasyl Karazin Kharkiv National University. Scientists will investigate how ecosystems function in isolated Ukrainian steppes.

The Biodiversity Genomics Europe project will be implemented with 32 partners from 20 countries. The main coordinator of the project is Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands – a leading European scientific institution, with one of the world’s largest natural collections and focusing on research and monitoring of biodiversity on a global scale.

Poland is represented in the project by a research team led by Prof. Michał Grabowski, consisting of scientists from the Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Hydrobiology and the BioBank Laboratory of the Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, University of Lodz.

The main goal of the project is to better understand the evolutionary and biogeographic processes shaping the richness of European fauna and flora, as well as to create a uniform, international standard for ecosystem biomonitoring and to develop a common strategy to prevent biodiversity loss.