Deadline: 31-Jul-21
The Central Asian Desert Initiative (CADI) has launched its First Call for Abstracts on International Conference on Cold Winter Deserts in Tashkent, Uzbekistan with an aim to foster international collaboration in raising awareness of the importance of cold winter desert ecosystems.
The cold winter – also referred to as temperate – deserts are nature regions featuring unique ecosystems and species, spreading from northern Iran across Central Asia to Mongolia. Despite their ecological importance, temperate deserts are, according to a study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), one of the least recognized biomes worldwide.
CADI is jointly implemented by the University of Greifswald (Germany), the Michael Succow Foundation (Greifswald, Germany) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Sub-regional Office for Central Asia (Ankara, Turkey). This project is part of the International Climate Initiative (IKI). The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) supports this initiative on the basis of a decision adopted by the German Bundestag.
Thematic Areas
Applicants are invited to submit abstracts in the scope of the following thematic areas, but are not limited to these themes strictly:
- Biodiversity and ecosystem protection
- Transboundary migration of species in cold winter desert regions
- Protected areas
- Human security – improvement of livelihoods of local communities, infrastructure development, creation of new employment opportunities to make the villages in the deserts attractive for living.
- Climate change and combating desertification
- Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM) including sustainable land and pasture management (SLM) in CWDs
- Saxaul (Haloxylon ssp.) desert forests
- Best practices on data collection, management, and dissemination
- Water resources in desert areas and sustainable use of water (including traditional knowledge)
- The role of alternative renewable energy in desert areas
- Prospects for the development of agriculture in desert
- Any other topic relevant to CWD ecosystems.
Successful applicants will have an opportunity to present their research paper during the Conference or display their research outcomes at the poster session organized within the CWD Conference in December 2021. Selected abstracts will be published as a collection, and full papers be included in conference proceedings.
For more information, visit http://www.fao.org/europe/resources/callforabstracts/en/