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Co-ordinator’s blog

By on July 15, 2007 in EDGE HQ, EDGE Updates, Uncategorized, Yangtze river dolphin

It’s a sad but true fact of life that much of a conservationist’s time is spent applying for funding. This week Sam has been focusing on writing grant applications to generate more funds to support the Yangtze River fishermen surveys. This will supplement the funds we have already raised through online donations (thanks once again to everyone who is supporting this project). It is really important that the fishermen surveys take place as soon as possible. If there are any Yangtze River dolphins (baiji) left in the degraded river system then we have no time to lose. If it proves to be already too late for the baiji then we need to find out exactly what factors drove the species to extinction and ensure that the same does not happen to other threatened inhabitants of the Yangtze. You can find out more about Sam’s experiences during the 2006 Yangtze River survey on our slide show here.

Finless Porpoise

News from the field is that Uuganbadrakh, our long-eared jerboa EDGE Fellow is making tremendous progress, and has covered over 800km of potential jerboa habitat already, looking for signs of the little jumping creatures. Yuan Lei and Adiya, our two Bactrian camel EDGE Fellows are currently preparing questionnaires for stage one of their projects. They intend to interview villagers from the communities surrounding the wild camel populations they are studying to establish how their activities might be impacting on the wild camels. It is important that the questionnaires are designed carefully to ensure that the data collected is meaningful. The two Fellows are in contact and designing their studies in parallel, which means that they can provide each other with extra support and ensure the data collection techniques are standardised.

Yuan Lei

If, like me, you have been enjoying reading about Jonathan’s research in the Cyclops Mountains, make sure you check out next week’s instalment. Without giving too much away, I think it is safe to say that his next blog will reveal some exciting news…