AHEAD Update – December 2, 2003

Dear AHEAD colleagues -

I hope you are all doing well. Just a brief update, mostly related to the Proceedings, and to projects currently being followed-up on.

* I should again note that if you wish to be removed from this e-mail list, please just let me know. My hope is to keep AHEAD Invitees up-to-date on developments post-Durban over time, but I certainly understand if anyone wants to opt out of receiving such messages.

*Many of you have now received peer-review comments back on your AHEAD Proceedings submissions. Some of you will receive your papers with reviewer comments back shortly. I thank all of the reviewers (including those still editing away) and authors, and request that authors who have received their drafts back and who are agreeable to taking on revisions return their papers to me by the end of this month (Dec. '03) if you have not already done so. If this is not possible, please let me know. Thanks!

*A small number of you have requested and been given extensions for your full paper submissions. Unless we have made other arrangements, I need all full papers by the end of December in order to include them in the Proceedings. Please contact me if this is not workable for you. Thank you.

*A number of you are approaching the Wellcome Trust for support, and some of you met the Trust for the first time at the AHEAD forum (great!). When you submit your proposals to Wellcome, please mention that you learned about their programs and funding at the AHEAD World Parks Congress meeting if that is the case. We want to continue to follow progress on ideas that came out of Durban informally, and letting potential donors know that you heard about them there helps.

*For those of you still planning on commenting on the draft Working Group Notes, please send me your comments by the end of December (as a reminder, please use 'track changes'). Only you know if these notes are accurate.

*We are currently looking for sponsorship to host a web-based video archive and possibly develop a CD-ROM of the AHEAD World Parks forum. I've begun reviewing the tapes, and the set of talks and the discussions they helped generate are among the best I've ever seen from a meeting like this (if I may say so!). We would love to find a way to make this great material available to interested parties for free via the World Wide Web. If you have any ideas on potential sponsors (including those with server space), I'd love to hear from you.

*Finally, the first follow-up meeting on the part of the AHEAD Great Limpopo TFCA Working Group was quite successful. Approximately 20 people attended the session last month at Onderstepoort. A summary document is in preparation, and will be circulated back to all of the folks who were at Onderstepoort for the meeting as well as to all members of the GLTFCA Working Group from Durban who couldn't make it to Pretoria in November (anyone else who is interested is of course welcome to receive the notes when they're available). Several new participants and institutions joined us in Pretoria, making the prospects for ongoing development of integrative ideas for the GLTFCA that much more robust. We may be in a position to bring GLTFCA-interested parties together again in February. More on that as we look at schedules and progress on the draft documentation.

That's all for now. Thanks very much,
Steve O.