The overall aim of the project is to deepen the existing collaboration between the IVB (Institute of Vertebrate Biology) staff and to establish new prospective collaborations with the aim of connecting teams and combining different methodological approaches in zoological and ecological research. This will lead to an improvement of the quality of research at the IVB, both by acquiring new skills and by transferring these skills. All potential participants in the planned mobilities actively supervise university students, at all levels, and many are also members of PhD advisory committees at various Universities in the Czech Republic and abroad. The foreign experience gained within the project will therefore also lead to the improvement of all levels of teaching, and especially the education of young promising students working at the IVB. The project will enable the implementation of plans for competitive collaborative projects at European and global level (e.g. Horizon 2020 or ERC projects). One of the major aims of the project is to analyse large unique datasets obtained in the framework of projects carried out at the IVB and collaborating institutions (, and this will be reflected in the quality of the resulting scientific work. The collaboration will lead to better processing of the data obtained and a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in particular fields of zoological and ecological research, namely the speciation and extinction, biogeography and biodiversity, reproductive biology, coevolutionary processes, spread and virulence of emerging zoonotic diseases, etc.
