Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Working on a Marine Protected Area around the Koh Rong Archipelago

In a meeting around one week ago, Dennis has been elected by the community of dive operators to be the representative of the industry in the upcoming discussions regarding the location(s) of the marine protected areas which will be set in place soon.


Thats good news for all the creatures in the Cambodian sea, the only questions is where will it be best to have conservation area's? Which islands and sites offer the highest biodiversity and where can endangered species be found?

Lots of questions to be discussed, of course also involving the local fishing communities, government officials and the long established local conservation organizations.

We might in future loose some of our divesites but in the long term the quality of diving in Cambodia will become better!

Friday, February 14, 2014

Island Species Database Cambodia

Since a long time friends of our are working on classifying terrestrial species found on the Cambodian islands. Especially Gil who is running trekking tours on our former island Koh Rong has made an enormous amount of pictures.
 

http://kohrong-samloem.com/

During the Khmer rouge times much of Cambodian national heritage, particularly in the fields of science and technical knowledge. So far little effort has been taken to classiefy animals and plants in Cambodia.

We are not-professionals but living for years on and around the Cambodian coastal area and of course we have been interested in finding out more about our surroundings.

After a rather fruitless period of research, we realized that there is little in the way of reasonably documented wildlife. Well, as we are in a favorable position…..with good knowledge of the terrain…we should be able to create a general survey.

So we just started to record the wildlife on the islands of the “Sihanoukville Group”. Definition and archiving is going to take place on this site. Anything we do here is essentially standalone – pioneer work.  Certainly some support could help to speed things up – on the other hand we are free to follow our vision.
This is, where YOU come in – if you wish. In order to determine, verify and categorize species, have ideas… we are grateful for help and advice of – anyone, who wishes to get involved.

This message also goes out to all our guests, it would be much appreciated if you could send any pictures taken of plants and animals to info@diveshopcambodia.com or directly visit http://kohrong-samloem.com/.