Professor Narcís Prat, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, has been given the Lifetime Achievement Award in Limnology 2020 by the Iberian Association of Limnology (AIL), an award that honors “his large scientific production, contribution to the development of Limnology in the Iberian Peninsula, his teaching and training dedication, the activity of knowledge transfer to society, administration and water resource managers”. The award ceremony will take place in the next AIL conference, to be held in Murcia in June.

As the jury states in the first edition of this award, “since 1972, Dr Prat has followed a brilliant scientific, teaching and managing career with a special sensitivity in the dissemination of sciences and a marked commitment to the conservation of ecosystems”.

The members of the jury also highlight the importance of Prat’s research being useful to society, “ranging from political requests working for the implementation of the Water Framework Directive to the NGOs that work for the implementation of a new water culture in Spain”.

Research, social commitment and scientific dissemination

Narcís Prat is a prestigious expert in the field of the ecology of rivers and has contributed actively to define a new model of water management in Spain. Director of multiple research projects, Prat has been advisor at the Catalan Water Agency, among other positions, and is one of the founding members of the New Water Culture Foundation.

Prat was the first director of the Research Group Freshwater Ecology and Management (FEHM), affiliated at the Water Research Institute (IdRA) of the UB, and has coordinated the European project LIFE TRivers, which provides tools to assess the ecological state of temporary rivers and improve its management according to the objectives of the EU Water Framework Directive. In this context, he is the head of the citizen science project called RiuNet, an interactive tool to better know the water ecosystems –which received the Premi Medi Ambient 2017 by the Catalan Government in the category of top initiative, as well as the Antoni Caparrós Prize, by the Board of Trustees of the UB, to the top project on knowledge transfer, technology and innovation.  

Active scientific disseminator and collaborator with the media, in 2016, Narcís Prat received the 3rd Award of the UB to the top science and humanities dissemination activities. Among his recent works are Ramon Margalef, ecólogo de la biosfera (Publications and Editions of the UB, 2015), jointly published with Joandomènec Ros and Francesc Peters. The book, edited with the support of Agbar Foundation, is the scientific biography of the professor from the University of Barcelona, the most prestigious Spanish ecologist, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death. Also, the book Andanzas y desventuras de un ecólogo en los juzgados del “reyno” (Milenio, 2019), narrates his participation as ecologist in trials on environmental crimes, especially waste dumping in rivers, from 1989 to 2001.