The 23rd Annual Sharjah International Conservation Forum for Arabia's Biodiversity was held at Sharjah Safari, United Arab Emirates (UAE), during 5–8 February 2024. This Forum brought together over 200 participants regionally from Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen and internationally from Australia, France, Germany, Greece, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, the UK and the USA. The Sharjah workshops are hosted by the Environment and Protected Areas Authority, Government of Sharjah, under the patronage of H.H. Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed al Qasimi, Member of the Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah. The 23rd meeting had multiple themes: species prioritization for conservation, rewilding and multi-species translocations, conservation genetics and marine strandings.
In the prioritization theme, using general overview presentations and international and regional case studies, participants were introduced to approaches to species prioritization through scoring species against selected criteria, including classification of extinction risk by applying Red List assessments derived in previous forum meetings. Working groups applied criteria to a subset of Arabian species to rank their importance for conservation action.
The rewilding theme focused on trophic rewilding and the use of conservation translocations to restore trophic interactions to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems, and looked at case studies involving seagrasses, marine and freshwater fishes, and terrestrial Arabian fauna, including the restoration of predator–prey systems.
The conservation genetics theme was led by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland's WildGenes laboratory, extending the 2023 meeting's theme by introducing the application of genetic scorecards to assess risk to wildlife genetic diversity. Genetic scorecards are an assessment tool recommended by the Global Species Action Plan to support monitoring of genetic diversity under Target 4 of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Working groups used Regional Red Listing outputs from previous Forum workshops, and conservation genetics literature, to make draft assessments of key threatened species.
The marine stranding theme focused on marine turtles and sea snakes and worked towards the formation of a marine stranding response network. The first session was devoted to organizations already active in marine animal strandings. Speakers shared research on risks and pollutants affecting marine animals, including oil spills, boat strikes, micro/macro-plastics and pesticide toxins. Lectures on the anatomy and pathology of sea snakes and turtles complimented autopsies performed on several species. Standardized sample and data collecting protocols were developed.
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