Well, I´m a bit too lazy to take out my poor english but ok
I´m still working on my date from 2006-2015, around 600 fielddays and around 7000 observations.
And this is the problem – fieldwork is just the tiny party of the work!
Let me say, I need at least another year until I have the basic data finished.
For each animal I found I need a few seconds or often hours until I knew if it is well knows or new. Still a few hundred left
Whatever, it always feels as if numbers are getting worse all the time but looking at the numbers per day/hour that’s not complete true – at least not for every subpopulations.
But animals per day/hour is too influenced by me and my personal still growing snake hunting skill.
The pure number of different animals each year is a way better indicator to draw a conclusion!
And we have to look at one more thing. These Subpopulations are all located deep in the forest. Since 1990 they chanced the forestry due to nature protection things.
They stopped complete to cut huge areas of trees at one moment. Now they just take out a few bigger trees and start to plant new ones direct.
In other words, since 1990 they did everything to get rid of even the smallest open area inside the forest. So habitat loss is dramatic!!!
I´m sure without all the work we did here to safe the last places from getting pure dark forest the numbers would have declined dramatic and at a lot of places down to zero!
But this also means a permanent changing habitat for the animals with more or less a lot of disturbance by me because of cutting trees and monitoring. Of course I don’t catch them for monitoring and we cut mainly during the winter!
At some of these spots Numbers are still high … maybe just because they have no real choice to leave these places because there are no other ones...