Due to Covid-19 situation, the Mid-term Meeting Event of IDES project was held in a hybrid way - the PPs and some ASPs in Ingolstadt, other (including stakeholders) via zoom.

More than 100 participants attended the meeting in the venue or via zoom. All fields of interest were represented (water management, nature conservation and protection, environment research and protection, agriculture etc.) from national level (e.g. Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, Germany) and local authority (e.g. Buzău-Ialomiţa Water Basin Administration, Romania), to sectoral agencies (e.g. South-Transdanubian Water Management Directorate) and NGOs (e.g. Aquatic Biodiversity Center).

The first day of the Mid-term Meeting Event was dedicated to water quality improvement actions and to Ecosystem Services (common framework to assess the ecosystem services (ES) of floodplains in the Danube region: geographic and thematic coverage / presenting ES (Provisioning, Regulating, Cultural: evaluation methods, first results and outlook).

Day 2 was dedicated to IDES Pilot Areas – description, first results, stakeholder workshops results and to WP T3 (Strategy and first steps – first integration of stakeholders).

Two capitalization events took place during the Mid-term meeting: Interreg DTP-project “DaRe to connect” and PHUSICUS - Stakeholder Assessment of nature-based solution’s effectiveness.

”In only some words, we conclude after this meeting that is important to have a tool for communication (IDES tool) and find win-win situations, in order to reach the political level. As we have seen, there are some limitations, the availability of data is crucial and everybody here complained about the lack of data at national and regional level. What we have to do, and is a hard task, is to get good compromise between simplification and good results. But, in the end, the main objective of the project is to connect water quality through ES, and we have to focus on this objective.” – Barbara Stammel, project manager.