During our online Motus Europe meeting (a week ago) we identified the need for more collaboration, coordination and capacity biuilding within Motus Europe to expand the network. Therefore we agreed that it would be great to apply for a COST-Action (a EU-fund for extensive networking, training, etc., deadline October 21st 2025, Open Call: A Simple One-Step Application Process | COST). There was already a small group of people interested, see list below. As such an initiative is living from diverse international cooperation, we would like to invite and involve more interested people! Please feel free to reach out to us!
Mail
Name
Institution
country
animal group
lucy.mitchell@ugent.be
Dr. Lucy Mitchell
TEREC – Department of Biology University of Ghent
I’d suggest for starting the ball rolling to arrange intention to submit meeting where we all pick Ivan Maggini’s brain in terms of do’s and dont’s and tips as he is a current COST Action holder & lead and Lucy and me have been training on his COST workshop for MOTUS (but Ivan’s COST grant is about bird migration flyways and conservation actions and training needed rather than focused on MOTUS).
Would you be happy to start a poll collecting time availability for such a meeting? It will inform our further grant drafting and should help us a lot.
Just a suggestion for moving forward towards the deadline.
FYI, I’m happy to help from a Sensorgnome perspective (I’ve been developing the software for the past years). I do have both an academic and small company background: asking for money is something I do understand, although not the specifics of the EU.
last week on 16th of May, we had our first joint meeting discussing a potential application for a EU-COST action focussed on Motus capacity building https://www.cost.eu/. Attached you find the detailed protocoll (thanks Dmitry!)
2025-05-19_Meeting Minutes Summary.pdf (207.2 KB)
The key points are:
The group is very positive about trying to apply, so we continue planning.
It will probably take 3-4 years until succesfull application and then runs 4 years - meaning its a long term perspective
We have not yet found a potential chair of the action, as it requires a lot of work time (details in Document) - think about whether you can imagine being the chair.
We have to start identifying specific goals and working groups (COST is about networking, NOT funding any hardware!)
We want to have a further meeting in about a month, please take part in this poll until 31st of May to find a datetime: COST MOTUS action | DFN-Terminplaner
if you want to see how the application looks like, you can Access the succesful application of EUFLYNET here: https://www.euflynet.eu/. Go to the very bottom right of the page and find the word MoU - 027/23 to click on.