Uuganbadrakh Oyunkhishig, EDGE Fellow, has recently arrived in the UK, and will be working with ZSL for the next month on an internship scheme funded by the Student Conference for Conservation Science.
Uuganbadrakh is working on a project to research and conserve the unusual long-eared jerboa (Euchoreutes naso) in Mongolia, his home country. The long-eared jerboa is ranked 81 on our EDGE mammals list, and is threatened by human disturbance of its desert habitat as a result of increasing numbers of grazing livestock and illegal gold mining activities.
The Student Conference on Conservation Science is the only international conference aimed entirely at students. It helps young conservation scientists gain experience, learn new ideas and make contacts that will be valuable for their future careers. Over the past 10 years, the conference (held at Cambridge University) has hosted over 1,600 delegates from 106 countries worldwide.
Submitting his application for the SCCS internship in October last year, Uuganbadrakh hoped to spend his time at ZSL producing a policy paper from his research results, which will show how human activities are impacting small mammals in the Mongolian Gobi desert. Luckily his application was successful, and he is set to spend the next month working to produce this document, which will be aimed at the Mongolian Ministry for Nature, Environment and Tourism.
We hope that when Uuganbadrakh takes his research back to the Mongolian officials, it will help to encourage the protection of the Gobi desert, and its unusual inhabitants.
To support the EDGE Fellows conservation programme, training aspiring conservationists working on unique and threatened species, please donate here or become an EDGE Champion.