Przewalski's horse, once listed as Extinct in the Wild (EW), is now listed as Endangered thanks to the ongoing reintroduction efforts. The Great Gobi B SPA is a part of the Protected Area system established in 1975 and declared an International Biosphere Reserve in 1991. This Protected Area in SW Mongolia is a reintroduction site for the Przewalski’s horse. The final goal of study of Anna Bernatkova is to find out the behavioural patterns of Przewalski’s horse in the Great Gobi B Protected Area in Mongolia and to detect individual, social and ecological influences affecting its behaviour. Studying the behavioural patterns of Przewalski’s horse is essential to understand the ecology of the species, and to anticipate potential intraspecific, interspecific and human-wildlife conflicts. The differences in the behavioural patterns of recently re-introduced, long-term re-introduced and wild-born individuals were recorded on the video and will be further investigated in order to understand factors affecting these differences and to analyse the importance of these individuals at the herd and population level.
On Friday the 27th of October the Great Gobi B SPA management organized a plastic awareness workshop in the local school of Bij Bag, located in the buffer zone of the protected area. The workshop was organized by specialist Altansukh Nanjid, Anna Bernátková (PhD candidate at the Faculty of Tropical AgriSciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague) and Lena Michler (PhD candidate at the Faculty of Agroecology in the Tropics and Subtropics, University of Hohenheim, Germany).
The aim was to talk about plastic pollution of the environment and the risks for wildlife related to plastic. Besides, ways how to reduce plastic waste in every day life were discussed with the students.
The students actively participated and had a great knowledge about the importance of the protected area already. The teachers highly appreciated the initiative and welcomed the idea of more such workshops by the park management in future.
And how the every day routine of searching for horses, video recordings of horses, weather measuring, data handling and analysis of the videos looks like? You can find out more in the gallery below.
This project is being accomplished thanks to the cooperation of Prague Zoo, our faculty and the Great Gobi B SPA.
