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This project is funded by the UK Government's Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, through its Darwin Initiative fund. The Darwin Initiative was set up in 1993 as part of the UK's contribution to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Darwin Initiative assists countries rich in biodiversity but poor in resources with the conservation of biological diversity and the implementation of the Biodiversity Convention. Projects funded under the Initiative are collaborative, involving either local institutions or communities in the host country. More details about the Darwin Initiative can be found at http://www.darwin.gov.uk/
The project has four main strands:
Saiga Research Expedition
On 27th June 2015, a 12-day expedition was launched to
investigate the reasons for the mass die-off of Saiga antelopes in
May 2015. (On 5 June the official death toll stood at 134,000
saigas).
The main goal of this field mission was to follow the migration
routes taken by saiga antelope this spring and take samples of the
environmental components; water, soil, and vegetation, which may
have all potentially affected the saigas, as well as investigating
possible links with deaths of domestic animals and speaking to
local people.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the saiga almost disappeared because of intensive hunting and a few harsh winters. It was only in the 1930s that the saiga population started growing again, under the protection of the Soviet authorities.
By 1950, the recovery allowed commercial hunting to develop in Kazakhstan and Kalmykia. The saiga population was maintained at around a million, thanks to the efforts of the Soviet forest department and a reproduction pattern that allowed the species to grow by up to 60% over one year.
In 1987, a reintroduction project was initiated in Wuwei Endangered Wildlife Breeding Center of Gansu, in order to recover the population of this species in China. From 1993, the saigas were released into an enclosure of 27ha area. The various vegetation types and topography was similar to the habitat in the wild. It provided the animals with a semi-natural condition. Scientific study of animals in such a condition may be a kind of transition from captive to wild. It can play important role in the conservation of target species.
As the rural economy has disintegrated, the saiga has suffered a dramatic increase in poaching (Bekenov et al., 1998). Thus the investigation reported in this thesis includes ecological, epidemiological and socio-economic aspects, all of which were necessary in order to gain a full picture of the dynamics of the infectious diseases of saigas and livestock in Kazakhstan.
We evaluated the repeatability, practical feasibility and
comparability of three techniques for age estimation of saiga
antelopes; the tooth sectioning technique (TS), the tooth eruption
and wear technique (TEW), and a visual ageing technique routinely
used in field studies. We found that TS and TEW gave repeatable
results, and agreed well. The visual method underestimated the age
of males compared to laboratory methods. It assigned animals
consistently to the age class of at least one year old, but less
consistently to the age class less than one year old.
In fact, the grave environmental and health effects of nuclear weapons testing at Semipalatinsk are now clear. Less well known are the consequences of biological weapons testing on the territory of Kazakhstan. From 1936 to 1992 , Vozrozhdeniye Island, an island in the western part of the Aral Sea whose territory is divided between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the major proving ground in the Soviet Union for the open-air testing of biological warfare (BW) agents.