The Fourth and Final Meeting of the AfricanBioServices Consortium

Photo: Per Harald Olsen/AfricanBioServices

Scientists and scholars from Tanzania, the Netherlands, Kenya, Norway, South Africa, USA, Germany, Denmark, and Scotland presented years of research on the Greater-Serengeti Mara Ecosystem.

Keynote addresses were given on the following topics

  • Past, present, and future: research in biodiversity and ecosystem function in GSME
  • Wildlife population dynamics and its drivers-key findings
  • How biodiversity enables different ecosystem services along landscape gradients: scientific outcomes
  • Quantifying human reliance on the environment
  • Execution of project activities from 2015 to 2019 and Implications of the developed database
  • Assessing options for natural resource management
  • How biodiversity enables different ecosystem services along landscape gradients

Policy briefs are being finalized on the following topics

  • Human Wildlife Conflicts
  • Livelihoods and population growth
  • Diseases and Quality of water and soil
  • Impacts of illegal encroachment
  • Land fragmentation and the future of Mara

Substantively, the meeting was an incredible synthesis of massive amounts of data.

Symbolically, the meeting represented conservation as true international cooperation.