Today colleagues and I announced the next round of African manatee conservation training workshops, to be held in Ghana in October and November. These training sessions, which are held over 2 weeks as we camp on Lake Volta, are one of my favorite things that I do in Africa. It’s a rare opportiunity to be able to spend a nice long period of time with a group of people who are trying to start or continue manatee research and conservation in their countries, and there’s alot of comraderie and a sense of shared purpose. So I’m excited to continue planning for that. This is the last year Earthwatch will fund these training programs (they set out to do 3 years and this is it!) but I plan to continue similar training on a smaller level in other African countries in the future, since capacity building is included in all my research work.

If you are an African national interested in learning more about the training workshops (the application deadline is August 10) please submit a comment to this posting and I will forward the information.

But before all that, I’m headed back to Angola next week for a quick 10 day trip to do another round of manatee surveys in the Congo River. It’ll be great to get back out in the field after several months of being chained to my desk working on budgets and reports! So I’ll have fieldwork adventures to post.

I took this last August, a man using a small mangrove tree as a sail heads up the Congo River