The 2nd SPV congress - VI AEIP congress was held in the Girona’s Conference Center on 17 and 18 September 2009. Over 200 delegates and 32 speakers participated, from Catalonia, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Portugal.

Bioengineering is a constructive discipline having its own technical, ecological and environmental friendly scopes, by using living materials. These purposes are followed by using naturalistic construction modalities and exploiting the big potentialities of used materials. It is relatively recent and was developed mainly in central Europe: Austria, Switzerland, Germany, etc.., countries with a traditional sensibility to maintain the natural environment.

The conference was developed according to the PROGRAM, talking sessions and the technical tour to the bioengineering works done in Besalú.

A CONCLUSIONS post-conference document has been produced (in Spanish).

Basically:

Session 1.  Rivers, lakes and coastal areas: The rivers restoration has to be done under the principle of less intervention and greater degree of self regeneration, watershed scale, with monitoring programs and the greater social involvement.

Session 2. Mining: The restoration of large areas of land highly degraded is accomplished using vegetation and through innovative systems to encourage fauna colonization.

Session 3. Natural Environment and High Mountains: The bioengineering techniques are particularly suitable in the forest hydrological restoration and the recovery of high mountain areas. Regarding the restoration of burned areas, the use of residual plant material plays an important role, and it’s used to build fences and other natural structures to control soil erosion and helping the regeneration of the flora.

Session 4. Stabilization of slopes and Infrastructure: Innovation and advances in bioengineering techniques come from a deep knowledge of the place, the techniques used in the past, the experience acquired in situ  and the adaptation to local conditions. Bioengineering stabilization and mixed techniques have been proven ideal for landscape and environmental integration of linear infrastructures.

The Congress was organized by the AEIP (Spanish Association of Landscape Engineering), SPV (Plant, Garden and Accessories) tradeshow, Fira de Girona and Girona Association of Nurseries, sponsored by ESPA and supported by Girona Province and the Government of Catalonia.