Objectives

The Institute for Game and Wildlife Research (IREC - CSIC, UCLM, JCCM) has as its foundational objectives to guarantee the sustainability of the hunting activity, contributing to the maintenance of biodiversity, and promoting its socioeconomic performance. In short, then, the IREC was born with the mission to generate and disseminate scientific knowledge that allows maintaining a balance between hunting and conservation.

This objective is pursued through four types of activities:

• Research activities: that intend to deepen from the scientific perspective in the knowledge of hunting species.

• Education and training activities: Through teaching, mainly at the postgraduate level, it is intended to transmit to the university environment the knowledge acquired through scientific research on hunting species.

• Transfer activities: The transfer and management of knowledge constitutes one of the six priority axes of the Spanish Strategy for Science and Technology and Innovation. For this reason, at the IREC we make innovation and the results derived from our science and research are available to society and the market. We are open to the establishment of contracts and agreements with public or private institutions for the development of scientific and/or technical work, as well as the design and execution of various specific training tasks.

• Communication activities: Through the organization of informative courses, talks, and collaboration in widely distributed publications, the aim is to make the knowledge acquired through research on hunting species to reach the general public.

With the incorporation of new researchers and their stabilization, the IREC has expanded the objectives of its master lines of research, and currently we can distinguish studies associated with the hunting-sustainability interaction of the natural environment, with purely ecological-evolutionary studies with a preferably conservationist approach, as well as in the field of health or animal production.