The prestigious Daikin Biodiversity Conservation Award was awarded for the year 2018 to the doctoral thesis Biodiversity conservation in permanent crops and grasslands by Giacomo Assandri.
Assandri has obtained a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences, with a scholarship financed by MUSE (Trento). Supervisors of the project were Giuseppe Bogliani (Department of Science and Earth – Pavia), Paolo Pedrini and Mattia Brambilla (MUSE).

Assandri’s thesis defines sustainable management practices aimed at favoring biodiversity in permanent agricultural systems and, more generally, their environmental sustainability. This objective is particularly urgent, since these agricultural systems have been excluded from the greening obligation foreseen in the Common Agrarian Policy (a set of rules aimed at improving the sustainability of the agro-ecosystem, mandatory to receive the economic contributions for that sector), as they are considered -incorrectly- sustainable per se. The need for evidence-based conservation measures was one of the leitmotiv of the research project, which led to the publication of eight papers on these topics in international scientific journals.

In all, Daikin Award received 15 applications from researchers from 11 different Italian universities about the most varied aspects of biodiversity conservation.
The award will be presented during the annual conference of the BBCD Department of the Sapienza University of Rome.