A year after our initial meeting in Rome the project has made good progress and is on-track with the timetable we proposed there.

The main achievements this year have been:

• We have agreed the exact boundaries of the area to be mapped and prepared maps of the CGRS cells for each country (available here).

• We have agreed a full species list for the area, annotated with cases where taxonomic decisions may need to be made as the project moves forward. We recognise that changes may need to be considered during the lifetime of the project and have set up a system for doing this,

• We have appointed coordinators for almost every country involved in the project, as well as a small number of topic coordinators to help with the work (available here).

 For 2018, we are planning an opportunity for all our coordinators to get together and discuss topics relating to the collection, management and storage of data for the atlas. We will also be opening discussions with a publisher to begin the process of planning the publication and we will also start looking for authors to prepare the species accounts.