US-Southern Africa Workshop: Scientific Foundations of Programs for Community Based Management of Wildlife, Gwaai River, Zimbabwe, August 4-7, 1998

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9731004 Getz & Fortmann This award supports 22 participants (8 US and 14 African) in the US-Southern Africa Workshop on the Scientific Foundations of Programs for Community Based Management of Wildlife, to be held at Gwaai River, Zimbabwe, August 4-7, 1998. Additional participants include 2 from Europe, and about 40 from the Southern Africa region, including South Africa. The co-organizers are Drs. Wayne Getz and Louise Fortmann, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. David Cumming, Head of the World Wildlife Fund Program Office in Harare, Zimbabwe. This multidisciplinary workshop will include natural and social scientists, resource managers, and policy makers. Many parts of Southern Africa are starting to use community based natural resource management (CBNRM) programs to preserve rural savanna lands as a mean of augmenting national park areas. Currently there is a great deal of variation among the sets of data collected, interpreted, and disseminated by the CBNRM programs. As a result there are no reliable regional assessments on these ecosystems, or on how they are being affected by development and global change. During this workshop participants will learn about CBNRM programs in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, after which they will form working groups in the areas of: 1) environmental monitoring and evaluation, 2) software and hardware programs, and 3) community management and program evaluation. Each group will identify its database needs and requirements, and then collectively they will establish a common set of scientific protocols and software packages to be used by all CBNRM programs for the collection, interpretation, and management of data, and for program evaluation. The use of these common protocols and software packages will increase the reliability of data collections and assessments, which will enable the information to be used for a new, long-term regional data base on Southern Africa's savanna ecos ystems which are outside of the national parks. The establishment of such a database will be a very significant contribution to the region's scientific infrastructure, and its availability will also enable researchers worldwide to have access to new knowledge about the loss of biodiversity in Southern Africa. The common protocols will also be used in a SAVE GAME (Southern African Veld Ecosystems Geographic Assessment, Monitoring, & Evaluation) pilot program to provide areas of rural Southern Africa with scientifically well designed CBNRM programs. This grant will support the participation of two graduate students from the United States. The Division of International Programs and the Division of Biological Infrastructure are jointly supporting this workshop.