Crowd-sourcing an atlas of migratory bird hunting

OSME has received a request from Dr Paul Jepson of the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, asking us to help with a project to create an atlas of migratory bird hunting. As he states, this practice is still widespread yet we lack an easily accessible overview of where hunting happens and what the trends are.

Dr Jepson has created a short questionnaire linked to a mapping interface on the Ushahdi platform.

http://research.ouce.ox.ac.uk/limesurvey/index.php?sid=47842&lang=en

Dr Jepson would be extremely grateful if you could first complete the questionnaire if you have knowledge (not necessarily first hand) of migratory hunting and secondly circulate news of this project via your networks and the birding and conservation social media with a request for community members to map and contribute their knowledge. This can be first-hand knowledge, from reports or books, or from friends and acquaintances.

Dr Jepson’s intention is to focus on the Mediterranean basin first. If successful this approach could generate a global map to bring wider attention to the issue and as a resource for policy and research. It may also inspire other projects to map the interactions of people and birds. The idea for this project arises from a collaboration with Cery Levy and the Bird Effect.

OSME feels this is a very worthwhile project to be associated with and would therefore encourage you to participate if you have knowledge of migratory hunting in the OSME region – in the first instance the Mediterranean basin