Development of a European Large Carnivore Conservation Newsletter
Large carnivore conservation represents a challenge wherever it occurs. Many tools exist to address these challenges. Some of these tools are new, many are traditional, and throughout Europe we are seeing a rapid development of their application. Because the challenges are so crucial and the rate of development is so fast there is a real need to ensure a ready flow of information and exchange of experience between the many practitioners that are operating in Europe and beyond. Conventional channels, such as peer reviewed journals, are too slow and do not provide a suitable forum for much of the information (often based on experience rather than science) that must be exchanged. To fill the gap there is a need for a Pan-European newsletter that ensures the rapid flow of information from diverse sources.
From March 2000 until December 2005 the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe (LCIE) edited 9 issues of a newsletter called Carnivore Damage Prevention News (CDPNews). The newsletter brought together experience at damage mitigation and conflict reduction. Each issue of this newsletter was mailed to several hundred subscribers and downloaded by thousands. While it ran this proved to be a very effective way of helping practitioners exchange experience and build networks. The newsletter stopped in 2006 due to lack of funding. We have also run a website (www.lcie.org) since the early 2000’s that has been both a repository for a wide range of reports and a news centre for carnivore issues. The latter function has proven difficult to maintain current because of time constraints.
The LCIE now proposes to combine these early initiatives (CDP News and the news section from the webpage) into a quarterly newsletter called European Large Carnivore Conservation that will be distributed as a downloadable pdf. The newsletter will present both longer articles and shorter news items covering the whole range of carnivore conservation issues – not just the livestock conflict issues that CDP News focused on. The longer articles will present both technical reports and more popular summarises of different case studies while the news items will simply try to keep people up to date with the rapid developments that are happening across Europe. Although the length of the newsletter will vary, we imagine a product in the region of 10 to 20 pages in length.
The funding requested from the EAZA campaign is intended to cover the first year (3 issues) of the newsletter. This requires some initial investments to develop a simple and sustainable layout and then the labour costs of generating the first 3 copies. By the end of the year the newsletter should be so well established that it should be able to run itself on much less funding in a sustainable manner.
Project aims and objectives
The project aims to:- Develop a layout of a newsletter
- Produce 4 issues during the first year
