Center for Wild Animals, Kalmykia, Russia. © Anthony Dancer

This project is the culmination of long-term collaborative work between the project applicants and builds on the Saiga Conservation Alliance’s long experience of involvement of local communities in saiga conservation in Uzbekistan. We ran a 6 month pilot project in 2008, which had 98% approval among villagers, and established robust protocols for monitoring saigas. In 2009, we asked farmers about their observations of saigas, discovering that saigas are widely distributed year-round, having lost their seasonal migration patterns. We also found evidence that poaching is widespread, well recognised as a problem by local people, and the main determinant of saiga distributions nowadays. Our long-term public engagement programme has excited the imagination of children and adults through competitions and media awareness. This project will consolidate our work into a network of “saiga friends” that will build a sustainable collaboration between NGOs, the Ministry of Natural Resources and local people. It will also provide the ecological information we need to plan future conservation activities. It is particularly timely, as 2010 is the Year of the Saiga in Kalmykia.

Field transport - Center for Wild Animals. © Anthony Dancer

Our objective of improving the status of saigas in Russia will be achieved by building capacity among local people to participate in ecological monitoring, assessing the status and trends of their saiga population. This project will be a pioneer in the involvement of local communities in natural resource management in the region, and will help the Kalmykian government to reverse the rapid decline of the species in the region due to poaching.

More broadly the work will establish a sustainable, long-term participatory monitoring programme in a region which has no tradition of grassroots conservation or individual environmental action. This will enable local people to show that it is possible to make a difference to conservation as an individual. It will build a sense of pride in the region’s natural heritage, of which the saiga is a flagship, and a wider sense of empowerment.

The project will contribute to a growing international body of knowledge about how best to implement participatory monitoring, for a highly mobile species for which individual participants may only make observations for a few days a year, yet must maintain interest in the programme year-round, as a negative observation is just as important for understanding saiga distributions as a sighting. The fact that locals also poach saigas is a challenge which we address with our “saiga friends” approach, empowering local advocates for change.