Best Practice Guidelines for the Surveys and Monitoring of Great Ape Populations

From the website: The IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group is publishing new guidelines for surveys and monitoring of great ape populations. These guidelines address a need which has existed since great ape studies began -- the challenge of collecting consistently high-quality data for comparison between a wide variety of sites, and often across many years. This need is driven less by academic interest than by the urgent demands of field-based conservation. The maelstrom of threats which now endanger all the great apes must be addressed by immediate action on every scale: initiatives at individual sites, strategies on the regional and national level, and species-wide action plans and international accords. All of these efforts must be founded on accurate field data -- and to fully understand the impact of specific threats, and to measure if conservation programs are succeeding, it is essential to have baseline density estimates and sustained monitoring of great ape populations. The newest publication in the Best Practice series outlines current approaches to these issues, offering guidance and perspective on choices that must be made by wildlife biologists, site managers, government agencies and the conservation community at large. This report provides an overview of the variety of survey methodologies that have been developed, as well as a decision tree to help select the approach that is best for a particular site or situation, depending on available resources. As a continuation of this report, a series of modules will be made available online, which will present detailed information on survey design, field techniques, analytical approaches, and practical issues such as logistics, finance and standardized reporting. These new IUCN guidelines will help researchers to standardize their data collection and, just as importantly, will allow for improved comparisons between datasets. This will complement the A.P.E.S. database (http://apes.eva.mpg.de), which is intended to serve as a repository for survey data on great apes, and to analyze trends in their populations. These survey and monitoring guidelines, combined with resources available via A.P.E.S., are important steps towards a comprehensive understanding of the conservation status of great apes, at both the population and species level. .