Learning from Spanish expertise: LIFE SUPport hosts an important police training workshop on wildlife crime
The LIFE SUPport project hosted a WildLIFE Crime Academy training workshop dedicated to police officers and nature professionals. It presented Spanish expertise in the detection and prosecution of environmental crimes through presentations and training on real-life cases.
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Why Spain is a model
Spain stands out in Europe for its highly organized, professional approach to wildlife crime. It is the country with the highest success rate in detecting and prosecuting environmental crimes in Europe. A key driver of success is SEPRONA, the Guardia Civil unit dedicated to nature protection.
The Spanish expertise is at the base of the WildLIFE Crime Academy, our LIFE project entirely dedicated to building capacity to detect, investigate, and fight wildlife crime. Hundreds of experts from across Europe, including several Croatian officers, have been trained there.
What the Croatian‑Spanish workshop covered
Senior expert associate for nature conservation at the Biom Association, Marija Martinko Ivanov, opened the workshop, focusing on the role of apex predators and scavengers in the ecosystem. Every criminal act against them threatens the survival of endangered species and jeopardizes the stability of their ecosystems. The State Secretary of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition, Željko Vuković, emphasized the need to establish a centralized, professionally trained, nature conservation service that could actively detect and suppress illegal activities in Croatia.
Participants learned how to recognise signs of poisoning and other illegal killing at the scene, how to secure and document evidence, and how to interact correctly with conservation‑management bodies and veterinarians. The session also focused on protocols for handling suspicious wildlife deaths. By simulating real‑life scenarios, trainers helped officers internalise the importance of meticulous documentation—critical for turning wildlife‑crime incidents into successful prosecutions.
A shield for Vulture
Poisoning remains one of the most serious threats to vultures and ecosystems worldwide. It indiscriminately wipes out scavengers that are essential for ecosystem health. The workshop highlighted a crucial lesson: vulture conservation requires a coordinated and proactive approach.
Workshops like this are essential for sharing knowledge, building effective systems, and directly supporting the conservation of griffon vultures, a species pushed to the brink of extinction by illegal activities such as poisoning in Croatia, particularly in the Kvarner region, where the last breeding population of Croatian Griffon Vultures remains, and across Europe.
