Home - News ( United States | United Kingdom | Italy | Germany ) - Football scores

Showing content from https://altyndala.org/the-initiative/ below:

The initiative - Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative

In 2006, a group of conservation professionals came together with the Government of Kazakhstan to form a partnership to enable the protection of fragile steppe, wetland and desert ecosystems, and allow the diverse wildlife to flourish.

This truly ambitious undertaking requires a deep understanding of the different needs, behaviours and interactions of many species across thousands of miles of landscape. It’s a challenge that draws on the skill and experience of each of the partners, from habitat protection and species research, to wildlife crime prevention and harnessing the power of community.

Together, we are the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative.

The Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative is a partnership that combines national and international NGOs, working alongside the Government of Kazakhstan.

Together, this pioneering partnership is discovering how to preserve and enhance a prehistoric ecosystem using 21st century conservation science. They each bring a wealth of experience to the table, from wildlife crime prevention and species reintroductions, to habitat management and advanced surveillance technologies. Let’s meet the partners…

ACBK staff collaring a saiga

How do you protect an area the size of Turkey for vulnerable wildlife? You can’t just throw up a fence around the border and declare it a nature reserve. It requires a much more targeted and strategic approach.

While we can’t protect every one of the 75 million hectares once occupied by saiga, we can protect the areas that are most important to vulnerable species. But species like saiga and kulan are nomadic, travelling as far as a thousand miles every year for feeding and breeding, so how do we also provide protection for them along the routes they travel?

To discover where species go and how they get there, we draw on the skills of the partners to put some cutting-edge monitoring and research into action.

Government rangers and monitoring specialists from the partnership use a suite of tools to keep track of saiga and kulan movements across the steppe. This includes satellite collars, autonomous camera drones and remote camera traps.

To deter and prevent wildlife criminals from taking saiga, we work together with border and customs authorities. We provide training and specialised sniffer dogs to help border and customs guards detect caches of saiga horns being smuggled out of Kazakhstan.

There is still so much we don’t know about the steppe ecosystem. Our researchers study every aspect of life here – from birds, small mammals, wolves to the botanical diversity. They study species numbers, behaviour and movements, and even soil quality, to understand better how to restore the ecosystem to full health.

Altogether, these monitoring efforts produce a huge amount of data. It’s a highly specialised job to analyse this information and use it to make recommendations about which areas deserve better protection, and to help inform habitat management plans.

Many important steppe species have disappeared or declined in number. We are working to restore a series of these species to their former range and numbers, enabling balanced functioning ecosystems to reemerge.

Poaching, disease and other pressures drove saiga antelopes extremely close to extinction. Our partnership came together to save the Critically Endangered saiga. We want to see saiga numbers return to the millions that roamed the steppe before the agricultural revolution of the Soviet era. We want to help these unique antelopes rebuild self-sustaining populations, which co-exist with the human communities who share these wild landscapes.

Kulan and kertagy were once common across Kazakhstan, but over the past centuries human pressure eradicated these charismatic species from the grasslands. Until recently, all that remained was a small kulan population in a protected area in the south, while kertagy have been completely absent from the landscape for the past 200 years. We are working to bring kulan and kertagy back to the steppe by translocating small groups and beginning to establish new populations in an area they once lived.

Baby saiga antelope at calving site

RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue

Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo

HTML: 3.2 | Encoding: UTF-8 | Version: 0.7.3