Coordinated for Italy by ISPRA, the Wetlands International project promotes the counting of water birds around mid-January across the entire European territory

These days, censuses of wintering waterbirds are starting in more than 2000 Italian wetlands as part of the International Waterbird Census (IWC) project. The project is coordinated by ISPRA, which makes use of a network of over 500 expert detectors and at least triple the number of collaborators, distributed throughout the country. Now in their 35th year of continuous activity across the entire national territory, the IWC censuses represent one of the longest-running coordinated Italian study projects, certainly the first in terms of capillarity and regularity of coverage at a geographical level.

Water birds are a fundamental component of wetlands. Diversity and number of individuals provide crucial information on the health status and environmental quality of frequented sites, but also opportunities to enhance wetlands for recreational purposes in a sustainable way. The protection, improvement and where possible the restoration of Italian wetlands have implications that go well beyond the protection of the species they host, including for example the elimination of carbon from the atmosphere, the protection from extreme meteorological events, the mitigation of effects of climate change.

Waterbirds represent a shared wealth among peoples: their long and complex migrations unite wetlands and people, regardless of cultural and political borders.