The first GAA3 meeting for Red Listing the amphibians of southern African
The first Global Amphibian Assessment (GAA) took place in various workshops around the world from 1999 to 2002. I got involved by helping to assess the South African pipids while at University of the Western Cape (Measey 2004), and later at a workshop in Watamu, Kenya in April 2002.
I hosted the first re-assessment of South African amphibians in 2009, a process that incorporated the published strategy for conservation research on southern African amphibians. Together with other members of the workshop, we turned the results of this meeting into a book, which I edited, and was published by SANBI in early 2011. The book is available as a free pdf to download, and you can get your own copy here.
We repeated the Red Listing process again in November 2015 (see here), and these results were carried into the second Global Amphibian Assessment (GAA2), one of the outputs of which was published last year (see here)
The assessments should be updated every five years, and so it was high time to do it again. This time we got together at the Calders Hotel in Fish Hoek.
It’s quite fun to see the faces in these images ageing. There are the loss of a few of the older faces too. But the really great thing was to see the large number of new faces who brought with them some excellent expertise that amazed me. The workshop was hosted by Josh Weeber and current southern African Amphibian Specialist Group Chair Jeanne Tarrant. This is the first workshop of the GAA3
Although we spent four days solidly assessing the amphibians, we didn’t finish. Lots more work to do before we can submit the updates and have them published on the Red List site. Stay tuned for this update.