The members of the MEASURES team from Karlovac University of Applied Sciences come from its Department of Wildlife Management and Nature Conservation. The Department was set up in 1999 and it has been actively engaged in both scientific and field work in this area ever since. In terms of education provision, the Department offers a three-year bachelor programme in wildlife management and nature conservation.

Croatia is a country with well preserved natural heritage and resources and its aim is to maintain this level of preservation as high as possible. There are 8 national parks and 11 nature parks in Croatia along with smaller locally managed protected areas. Nature protection, as an interdisciplinary science and professional field, focuses on the overall preservation of nature through the establishment, management, protection and monitoring of all protected areas in the nature. The members of this Department have been actively investing their efforts in this field for the last 20 years. 

In Croatia, the MEASURES project activities are carried out on the Drava, Mura and Sava rivers. The Dean Nina Popović, PhD, Marko Ožura, M.Eng., and Zrinka Mesić, PhD, are the scientific core team working on the project. Denis Savretić who has extensive hands-on experience on rivers conducts the majority of field work. The University’s team is backed up by the Croatian Ichtiological Society which has been contracted for testing the methodology of mapping the migratory fish habitats on Croatia’s Danube River basin rivers. 

So far, we have identified potential wintering, spawning and nursing habitats and we are carrying out field activities in selected sites on Mura, Drava and Sava rivers. The largest population of fish was found on the Sava River sites with a high degree of certainty that there are migratory fish among them, potentially even the sterlet. In comparison, a smaller fish population was recorded on the Mura and Drava rivers. The work on the Mura River is conducted jointly with REVIVO, the Slovenian partners in the project.