Dear Berislav, Mario, Jeroen, and all others,
Thank you very much for your replies and thank you even more for forwarding my request and providing the email addresses!
My intention was certainly not to be rude or “not user friendly”. It was more a compromise between writing to lengthy postings which are boring too many people and raising interest in our project. From my own personal subjective, I prefer shorter postings and longer direct emails from person to person.
As always, a compromise is not satisfactory for everyone, my apologies for that. Concerning my person, my name is Johannes Penner and I studied biology at the universities of Edinburgh (UK), Tübingen and Würzburg (both Germany). My main subjects were Tropical Biology and Animal Ecology. The main reason for studying biology has always been the fascination for snakes. Since I was a little kid I wanted to understand their behaviour and biology. Probably similar to Berislav, Jeroen, Mario and many others, the best part of my work was and is to be in the field! I worked in lots of countries around the globe, focusing on Central and Western Africa. My Diploma thesis was on community ecology of reptiles in Western Madagascar and my PhD on the macroecology of West African amphibians. At the moment I am working at the Natural History Museum in Berlin Germany, partly as a herpetologist doing science in numerous smaller projects, partly in a project concerned with overall European biodiversity on all levels from data gathering, over storage, analyses and informing politicians, and partly I work as a freelance consultant for environmental impact assessments. In addition, to the normal work as a scientist like teaching and supervising students and numerous other activities, I am currently actively engaged in the IUCN Viper specialist group (as Red List authority group coordinator) and the IUCN Amphibian specialist group (as facilitator of the climate change working group).
I have been working on European adders (Vipera berus) from 2001 to 2008 on a population in Germany. The main aims were to introduce students to field work, study the specific microhabitat requirements of the individuals at that particular site and use that to inform forestry workers what they could do to safeguard the species. We used mark-recapture data to estimate the population size. From that work and my experience in contributing to the IUCN global amphibian and reptile assessments, originated the idea that in many cases species are widely distributed but nevertheless many populations are threatened. Therefore we thought it would be interesting to try to quantify that and the European adder (Vipera berus) seemed like the perfect study case because it is widespread and lots of people did or still do mark-recapture studies. I know that it is challenging to estimate population trends for such a widespread species and that the conclusions stand or fall with the amount of population data we get and the geographic coverage. Nevertheless, I think it is worth a try and would be really awesome if we could pull this together.
Thus, I think I do not want to benefit from the data others gathered in years of hard field work with many sacrifices. I want to achieve that decision makers realise that they need to protect widespread species as well (keeping common species common is a nice related initiative from the US which summarises it nicely just by their title). I also offer anyone who is willing to contribute data co-authorship. So people get recognized and rewarded for their efforts. Unfortunately, I have nothing else to offer and I am not sure whether materialistic offers would be adequate.
I am aware of the fact that many people consider my request with very critical opinions and that I am exposing myself with that. However, I think the project is worth it. Do not hesitate if you have further questions. You can ask me either here in the forum or directly via email.
With best wishes and the hope that many other people are willing to contribute!
Johannes
PS: My web page is not too updated but you can find some more information here
http://www.naturkundemuseum-berlin.de/e ... 3Ftypo%3D2