The Wildlife Society starts a new project in Beit Sahour
The Wildlife Society, through the scientific studies and field department, has started this week to draft a new database of scientific wildlife and biodiversity in Palestine, in collaboration with the Natural History Museum Bayrische Zoologische Staatssammlung Witt Museum and the Museum of Natural History in Munich. The Society’s researchers, joined by D. Miller and Dr. Gunter Muller Vasily Kravchenko of the German museum and in cooperation with the municipality of Beit Sahour and the Palestinian water authority, erected fisheries to keep insects away from the Osh Ghorab site located in the City of Beit Sahour as a first step to study the project in terms of its considerations and the possibility of its application at the country level. The project will be carried out in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture and the Palestinian universities in the Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron areas, and the vegetable garden / Jericho station to observe and study the wildlife. It will be circulated to the rest of the country at a later stage. Mr. Imad Atrash, the Executive Director of the Society, declared that they had begun studying a field of science in Palestine that had never been officially studied there before. He further added that the Society had begun work to develop a mechanism for this project to be completed in the future on a nation-wide level in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture’s own economic vermin. Sources said that the General Entomology is very broad, and the types of insects in the country are not all known, especially those that are native to Palestine and those that migrate to Palestine from other regions. The Society considers this project to be a very important opportunity to learn and discover new species of insects. The first report on this study will be issued in summer 2008.
This project will be the first in Palestine and the Arab region, to use fisheries ("hand-made remnants of the local environment") placed in several areas, and to catch insects through lightning that runs light sources to attract insects that are then trapped in diesel at the base of the light source. After two weeks the insects are assembled, washed, and drying, and then scientifically classified in an internationally recognized manner. |
Mr. Atrash added that through these samples, the samples of mammals, plants, birds embalmed previously, and the environmental information on biological diversity, the Society will establish a Museum of Natural History in Beit Sahour in the near future in cooperation with the municipality, the people of Beit Sahour, and the Palestinians scientists who worked on documenting wildlife in Palestine.