Magazine of the species survival Commission specialist Group - IUCN

specialist group exchange
Dragonfly SG
Extensive databases to be
developed
Vincent Kalkman stood down as Chair
of the Dragonfly Specialist Group (DSG)
in July, as he wants to focus on his PhD
and other projects. Viola Clausnitzer will
serve as interim Chair until a new Chair
is elected in 2011.
In March this year, the European
Red List of Dragonflies was published.
The project assessed 137 European
species. It was found that most of the
Threatened species were concentrated
in the Mediterranean. However, many
of these species do not appear in the
Habitat Directive, the main European
environmental law, and thus a paper
presenting this problem and
discussing possible solutions is in
preparation.
In July this year, the First European
Congress on Odonatology was
attended by 90 people from over 20
European countries. Many of these
countries are engaged in atlas projects,
redlisting and development of
conservation action plans. The IUCN
activities in the last couple of years have
assisted in strengthening the European
dragonfly community.
The Pan-Africa Freshwater
Assessment, coordinated by the IUCN
Freshwater Biodiversity Unit, was
finished in 2009. A final report is
currently under preparation and papers
are planned. Pending on time and
funding, inferred distribution maps for
all African species and regional field
guides will be prepared.
Currently four assessment projects
for different parts of mainland SE Asia
and the Indian Peninsula are being
conducted. Some of these will be
finished in 2010.
Biofresh is a consortium of European
institutes working together to gather and
generate information on freshwater
topics. One of the projects involves the
gathering of distribution databases of
freshwater organisms in order to analyze
patterns in freshwater biodiversity, and
detect biodiversity hotspots and key
threats. For dragonflies, the work will
concentrate on tropical Asia and
America. A proposal for a project
focusing on digitizing the most important
dragonfly collections in the USA will be
submitted in 2011 to the National
Science Foundation. If the project is
accepted, this would increase the
information available for North, Central
and South America. The Netherlands
Centre for Biodiversity will decide soon
on a project to digitize part of their
dragonfly collection, thus developing an
extensive database for countries such as
Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the
Philippines. The databases based on
published records generated by the
Biofresh project will make it easier to
carry out redlisting in tropical areas.
IUCN and CI are therefore still actively
searching for grants to do assessments
in Australia, the Pacific, Brazil, the
Philippines and China.
Viola Clausnitzer
Interim Chair, Dragonfly Specialist Group
Equid SG
Conserving Africa and Mongolia’s
wild equids
The vision of the IUCN SSC Equid
Specialist Group is to conserve
biological diversity by developing and
executing programmes to study, save,
restore and wisely manage wild equids
and their habitats. Our greatest
challenge is to improve the conservation
status of wild equids, to sustain their
ecosystems and to enhance the
livelihoods of local communities.
Training of range state nationals is
an important component of achieving
these goals. In Ethiopia, Almaz Tadesse
completed her PhD on ‘Sustaining the
Alledeghi Grassland of Ethiopia:
Influences of Pastoralism and
Vegetation Change’, and is employed
as the Director of a local conservation
NGO. Fanuel Kebede will complete the
field research for his PhD on the
‘Ecology and Community-Based
Conservation of the African Wild Ass
and the Grevy’s Zebra in the Afar
Region of Ethiopia’ in October 2010. As
part of this research he will work with
Dr Albano Beja-Pereira to address
population genetics issues.
At the 2009 SCB meeting in China,
Peter Leimgruber, Hu Defu, and
Waltraut Zimmerman convened a
symposium on: Restoring Przewalski’s
Horses – Lessons Learned from In-situ
and Ex-situ Conservation.
In September 2010, an International
Conference was held in Ulaanbaatar on
Dragonfly Specialist Group, European Odonatology Congress. © Erland R. Nielsen
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