Acknowledgements

The present project goes back to an initiative of the Executive Secretary of CMS, Mr. Arnulf Müller-Helmbrecht, who had the vision to summarise the widely scattered knowledge about animal migration within a comprehensive database. Early drafts were developed in cooperation with Professor Dr. Clas Naumann, director of the Alexander Koenig Zoological Research Institute and Museum of Zoology (ZFMK), Bonn. The concept was enthusiastically supported by Dr. Hartmut Ihne, the first director of the newly founded Center for Development Research (ZEF), Bonn. Thanks are due to the German Federal Environment Ministry, for generous funding. The "Federal Agency for Nature Conservation" (BfN) not only administered funds provided by the BMU, but also provided scientific advice my special thanks to Dr. Horst Gruttke (BfN), for his advice and careful revision of drafts and manuscripts.

From the beginning, this was a joint project using the synergies provided by the genius loci. I want to thank the director of the Department of Economics and Technological Change at (ZEF), Professor Dr. Joachim von Braun, for hosting and constant additional support of this project, Professor Dr. Clas Naumann for hosting our GIS computer lab at ZFMK and his enthusiastic discussions, and Professor Dr. Klaus Greve and Jens Fitzke, Bonn University, for introducing me into the world of GIS and constant help during development of the geo-database. The Java programmers Thorsten Friebe, Markus Müller and Markus Bedel developed the innovative geographic query tool, and Angela Altmayer programmed the necessary ArcView script for calculating bounding boxes.

The presence of the UNEP-CMS Secretariat in Bonn allowed a constant discussion with the future users of the database. In particular, I want to thank Arnulf Müller-Helmbrecht for having guided me through the world of international nature conservation and UNEP conventions. The UNEP CMS secretariat staff helped by providing latest news and unpublished reports.

The development and filling of the database would not have been possible without the help of a number of student and research assistants. Special thanks are due to Géza Aschoff for designing the basic architecture of the database, Klaus Fretter for final database programming, Christoph Neef for making GIS maps, GIS consultancy and final map layout, and Martina Berg for patient data entry. Katja Kunz wrote most of the bird figure captions and German texts, and was a driving force in finishing this first printed volume of the UNEP-CMS. Uwe Vaartjes, Bonn, made title and final map layout, Bernd Bruhns, Bonn, text layout and editing. Several highly motivated student assistants and interns helped to correct and complement the database: Stefan Müller-Champrenaud, Max Holtmann, Sabine Knaelmann, Kerstin Königs, and Eva-Maria Heuel. Thanks to Philipp Wagner, for bird photographs in Figure A2.27, and to Suhel Al-Janabi, for the design of agreement maps.

This project would not have been possible without considerable input of digital data sets. My special thanks go to Rainer Froese (Fishbase, ICLARM, now Kiel University), who supported the GROMS from the beginning, and identified the present basic set of migratory fish species. Katrin Boehning-Gaehse provided her list of migratory birds (Eurasia and Americas). Thanks to Gerardo Fragoso and Christoph Zöckler (UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre), for providing CITES and 1996 Red List of threatened species and several bird maps in GIS format. Craig Hilton-Taylor (IUCN Cambridge) encouraged me to integrate the recent IUCN 2000 Red List data. Thanks to the generous policy of the Institute of Applied Ecology (Rome), it was possible to integrate basic GIS maps of African mammals. Michelle Kinzel (Florida) and Willem van den Bossche, Belgium, provided satellite data sets of turtles and black stork, respectively. Finally, several institutions and publishers did not hesitate to allow digitalisation of published data. Thanks to Lynx editions the "Handbook of the Birds of the World" was our bible for bird GIS maps, and thanks to Wetland International for permitting transfer of Eurasian Waterbird maps and point data into the GROMS database.

The completion of this volume required editorial skills far beyond my capacity, and I am grateful to Christopher Hay (Ecotranslation, Darmstadt), for linguistic revision, S. Simone for French translation, and my wife, Maria-Susana Cipolletti, for Spanish translation. To her, I am particularly indebted, for her encouraging support during the final stage of the project.

This document should be quoted as part of the publication "Riede, K. (2001): The Global Register of Migratory Species ­ Database, GIS Maps and Threat Analysis. Münster (Landwirtschaftsverlag), 400 pp." + CD

 by Klaus Riede