Rice, the primary staple food for half of the humanity, requires pesticides to achieve good yields, with consequential risks for the environment and human health. YES!BAT project promotes an Integrated Pest Management strategy to enhance ecosystem services provided by bats in rice agroecosystems. It is based on the employment in rice fields of bat boxes (artificial roosts) to encourage bats into areas where there are few roosting sites. The success of bat colonization in differently managed rice fields located in Piedmont (NW Italy) will be evaluated. Analyses of guano, collected from the occupied boxes, will provide information on pest-predated species and on emerging agricultural pests (chirosourveillance service). Through dissemination activities and materials, including a best practices document, YES!BAT aims at raising the awareness on the importance of bats and at promoting well-managed rice paddies as virtuous examples of traditional landscapes with an ecological value.
Malnutrition during the first 1000 days of life can have lifelong effects on a child’s development and constitute a window of opportunity to address nutritional deficiencies. In Lebanon, having the highest per capita concentration of refugees in the world, the nutritional status of children under-five and women of reproductive age is increasingly compromised by the protracted crisis. Up to date, there is a lack of studies assessing anemia and its associations with nutritional status, child feeding practices, mental health and household food insecurity in this context. This project is composed of two phases, a cross-sectional and an intervention study among mother/child pairs of Syrian refugees and their Lebanese host communities attending primary healthcare centers in Greater Beirut. The aim is to examine the underlying causes of anemia and to improve maternal and child nutrition using sustainable nutrition education approaches to fight hidden hunger in Lebanon and post-conflict Syria.