Legal Tools for Conservation Workshop

This weekend was the culmination of months of planning and work on everyone’s behalf to host the “Legal Tools for Conservation” Workshop at the Kino Center. The focus of the meeting was getting people together from as many different backgrounds as possible to come up with a conservation action plan for Estero Santa Cruz. In total there were about 50 local community members, ecology club students, scientists from the university, fisherman, conservation groups, and government officials. The meeting lasted the whole day and consisted of various presentations and round table discussions.

For a little background, Santa Cruz is a negative estuary (no fresh water input) of over 5,000 hectares that borders the town of Bahia de Kino. It is one of the areas of study for the Waterbird Monitoring Program, so I am getting to know it well. It is home to at least 84 different species of waterbirds (many endangered species), has 19 nesting waterbird species, and is composed of halophytic vegetation including black and red mangroves (both endangered species). In Mexico, there is no one government agency that is in charge of maintaining wetlands. Over the Last 10 years, there has been a gigantic boom in shrimp aquaculture development along the coasts. In the state of Sonora alone 25,000 plus hectares are developed for aquaculture. There is very little regulation of the industry as a whole, and there are many detrimental impacts on the environment, people, and flora and fauna. (DON”T EAT SHRIMP!!! That will be another blog, but it’s horrible farmed or ocean caught)

For the workshop I presented a 15 minute talk about the birds of the estuary. It was my first time presenting formally in Spanish. I stuttered over some words, but I think overall people could at least understand what I was saying! As pretty much the only group studying birds in the estuary, Prescott has the majority of data collected (thanks Abram!) which is going to be very important for pursuing legal protection. While we came to many conclusions during the meeting, it seems that the main thing we can do is apply the site for protection under Ramsar (The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance). While the site in fact already applies for 3 different bird based international recognitions, Ramsar is the one with the most teeth. We will be applying this summer with the goal of being internationally recognized next year. This would be a major step in the protection of this important area.