Today the University of Belize hosted day 2 of the 11th annual Natural Resources Management and Research symposium. The theme is making scientific data available to managers. Now it may sound like just another high level meeting of environmentalists and conservationists but all the topics discussed are very important and inevitably affect us all. We dropped by to find out more.
Said Gutierrez, President, Mesoamerican Society for Biology and Conservation
"The idea is to bring in researchers and managers in the environmental field, yesterday and today what we have had is a lot of people involved in actual research bringing some of that information to the table and with the potential of using that information for the guidance of management of protected areas of certain resources."
"We decided to bring in two different scenarios here so we have marine research and conservation initiatives, we also have terrestrial where we bring in all the stakeholders from the forest department and the co-managers of the protected areas."
"We highlighted the need to involve communities in conservation so there was one session dedicated to highlighting community businesses through the access of resources within protected areas."
"Another session that happened today was we focused on Icons and perils so looking at the issue with jaguars which has been in media in the past few week's issues with the manatees as well."
Courtney Weatherburne, reporter
"And of course this event apart from it being for the managers and researchers it is for students to learn especially those studying the field."
Said Gutierrez
"The theme of this year is using the Science for the improvement of management and in many ways we have to include the students because the students are hopefully going to be next generation of biologists, the next generation of managers and perhaps even e next generation of policy makers and that is what we need, we need all the stakeholders to come together."
There were 31 presenters in all for the two day event.
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