WLI News

 World Wetlands Day 2012 - Wetlands and Tourism

This year’s theme is wetlands and tourism, you can download further resources from the Ramsar web pages. We will also put your activities on the WLI website if you send us a short report and some pictures. We would love to show your examples of sustainable wetland tourism. For WWT’s WWD photo competition, please see check our web page here, to see winners of the international photo competition! We have also launched our new WLI leaflet and have sent our copies in the post, so you should have yours soon. If you would like to download one, please see the link here.

 Migratory Birds for People

The Migratory Birds for People group met in Belgium at the Uitkerksepolder wetland centre, hosted by Natuurpunt. The group shared experience of running wetland centres, took part in field trips including to Het Zwin which is undergoing major redesign, and planned for future funding proposals.  For further details, we will be uploading presentations and notes from the meeting to the MBP pages shortly.

In addition, our MBP partner in West Africa has been making good links with wetland centres in Mauritania, Senegal and Guinea Bissau, with further plans to visit them and get them more active within the MBP and WLI network.

WLI Americas

WLI North America put in a proposal to RBC for further development of the network. The proposal included development of wetland education resources for North America partners, recruitment of new members and increased communication, and a training workshop at Oak Hammock Marsh wetland centre.

CR took part in the Linking Communities meeting held by BirdLife Americas. The programme aims to link people living around important wetlands in the flyway, and there is the potential to work with WLI to support their progress. We discussed how WLI and the BirdLife project could usefully work together, and hopefully some joint work can be carried out.

We are working with the Fundación Kennedy to plan for activities in South America. The Chilean organization is keen to see more work being done with WLI in the region, and we hope to arrange some exchange visits, as well as the possibility of a WLI Neotropics conference.

WLI Wetland Lectures

WWT has been preparing wetland lectures for the University of Lahore's new Masters in Wetland Management.  Staff at the Slimbridge centre have pre-recorded lectures on 'wetland ecosystems', 'wetlands and communities', 'funcational wetlands' and 'wetlands and health'.  the lectures are then sent to colleauges in Pakistan and show to the students, with follow up questions live on skype with a member of WWT staff.  So far this has worked very well!