In the spring 2005 issue of The Horn, we reported the death of Mike Hearn, Research Director of Save the Rhino Trust (SRT) in Namibia, at the tragically young age of 32. Donations in his memory now total just over £11,100, and we have made an initial grant from that of £4,500 to SRT to support the camel monitoring team’s work. The rest of the funds needed to cover this for one year have come from the Desert Trek Namibia.
Information and results derived from the monitoring patrol teams will be coordinated and documented by a local SRT consultant for the Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET), with special input from local communities. SRT will design methodologies to assess habitat within the range area, and explore the possibility of expansion of the current range area for the rhino. The use of a GIS will be investigated to assess the role resource abundance has on ranging patterns, limiting density, breeding performance and health of the rhino population across the entire range area. This should enable SRT better to understand the role of density-dependent and density-independent factors in regulating population performance of the desert rhino, which live in such arid rangelands. The project will extend to include an assessment of seasonal fluctuations in the resources.
The second component of the project will determine the most effective sites to for monitoring human and vehicular access into the rhino range areas i.e. safari tours and self-drive tourism. These points will focus on gathering data on routes used by tourists, and the frequency and movement of livestock, allowing the role of human disturbance in the current range area to be quantified. These findings will contribute to a feasibility study being undertaken be the MET following a Cabinet submission to expand Namibia’s protected area network beyond the Skeleton Coast and Etosha National Parks to include the rhino area.
The other £6,600 is being held as restricted funding for SRT, and we will send that over with the next installment of the Desert Trek Namibia funding. We will ask SRT to suggest how they’d like to use the money.
Cathy DeanDirector