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Headquartered in Rio de Janeiro but acting globally, after ten years since its foundation, IIS expands operations by opening two offices overseas – IIS Australia (IIS AU) and IIS Poland (IIS PL), founded in November 2019 and May 2020 respectively. The international presence expands the capacity of IIS to exchange knowledge and inform decision making for environmentally sustainable actions. An institution based in a developing country opening branches in developed countries is unusual – the opposite of what usually happens – and shows the strength and recognition, nationally and internationally, that IIS has achieved in recent years.

About IIS Australia
IIS AU is a research institute located in Canberra (AU) with the vision to become an international hub for knowledge and capacity exchange in environmental decisions, mainly focused in Forest and Landscape Restoration, systems modelling, and spatial planning. It is aimed at developing research, capacity exchange and user-friendly tools to streamline the access to spatial planning for forest and landscape restoration in the implementation of sustainable environmental actions, national policies and reports, and private-sector investments.
It combines and enhances previous IIS experience in design and support implementation of public policies for ecosystem restoration in Brazil and globally, together with a research agenda of cutting-edge approaches for spatial planning and decision making leaded by Australian Institutions over the last decades.
IIS AU has two major projects in its first year of operation. The first project is a partnership with IIS Brazil, CI and CIFOR to develop a system modelling to spatially predict the potential for (assisted) natural regeneration in tropical and sub-tropical ecosystems. Predictive models with high degree of accuracy are particularly useful to inform management plans as higher certainty in management can reduce the need to invest in risk assessment and mitigation measures.
IIS AU has also partnered with IIS Brazil, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity and CIFOR to develop its second project. It consists of a user-friendly spatial optimisation tool to support countries to formulate more ambitious, realistic and specific forest ecosystem restoration plans and targets to meet their global commitments under the convention, taking into account is potential for natural forest regeneration.
This optimisation tool is part of a larger pool of decision support tools IIS has been developing. Sophisticated analytical tools are generally used by highly trained staff. However, the most useful analytical tools – such as the one being developed by IIS – are those that can be used by governments, practitioners, or even local communities.

IIS AU board of directors is composed by Renato Crouzeilles, Bernardo B. N. Strassburg, Agniezka Latawiec, Diego Bastos, Hawthorne Beyer, Mariana Ferreira and Lygia Baeta Neves.

Lear more at www.iis-au.org

About IIS Poland

IIS Polish branch is based in the city of Opole and is focused on the provision of ecosystem services, specially from natural grasslands. One of its major projects is being developed in a natural grassland area inside the Nature 2000 – a network of core breeding and resting sites for rare and threatened species, and some rare natural habitat types which are protected in their own right that stretches across all 27 EU countries, both on land and at sea. The Institute has already partned with the University of Agriculture in Krakow and the University of Opole for collaboration.

IIS PL board of directors is composed by Agniezka Latawiec and Bernardo B. N. Strassburg.