IENE Awards 2026 winners!

The IENE Personal Award 2026 was presented to Niki Voumvoulaki of Egnatia Odos S.A., Greece, in recognition of her long standing and outstanding contribution to advancing ecological connectivity and biodiversity conscious infrastructure practice in Greece and across the wider region.

Since joining the IENE community in 2011, Niki has remained closely engaged with the network’s principles and ambitions, most recently as an independent expert at the IENE and Bern Convention Technical Workshop on the Kresna Gorge case. Through her work at Egnatia Odos S.A., and in particular on the Egnatia Motorway, she has made a substantial and lasting contribution to improving the permeability of major transport infrastructure for wildlife, using the brown bear as a key indicator species. She has also generously shared this experience across international networks, including LIFE Safe Crossing and the HARMON projects.

This year’s IENE Project Award recognised not one but two exceptional initiatives, starting with LIFE AMPHICON (LIFE18 NAT/SI/000711), led by Katja Poboljšaj of the Centre for Cartography of Fauna and Flora, Slovenia.
The project delivered a landscape scale response to a long standing barrier problem for amphibians, combining around 7.5 km of road mitigation across five high conflict migration corridors with the creation and restoration of 91 breeding ponds and their surrounding terrestrial habitats. Its system scale approach to fencing and crossing structures, paired with Slovenia’s first standardised pre and post operational monitoring framework, offers a strong, transferable model for integrating amphibian conservation into infrastructure planning and maintenance.

The second IENE Project Award 2026 went to LIFE DANUBE FREE SKY (LIFE19 NAT/SK/001023) for its outstanding, large scale contribution to reducing bird mortality caused by electrocution and collision with power lines along the Danube river corridor.
Spanning seven countries and 23 Special Protection Areas, and bringing together 15 partner organisations, including nature conservation authorities and electricity and railway companies, the project combined a robust scientific methodology with concrete, wide ranging mitigation measures: insulating thousands of poles and installing flight diverters across hundreds of kilometres of priority power lines, alongside a strong record of monitoring, documentation and public engagement.