CEPF SMALL GRANT FINAL PROJECT COMPLETION REPORT I. BASIC DATA Organization Legal Name: BirdLife International – Ecuador Project Title (as stated in the grant agreement): Identifying Important Bird Areas in Belize and Guatemala Implementation Partners for This Project: Socieded Guatemalteca de Ornitología (SGO), Belize Audubon Society (BAS), Wildlife Conservation Society-Belize (WCS-Belize), Sociedad Audubon de Panamá (SAP) Project Dates (as stated in the grant agreement): 1 November 2005- 30 September 2006 Date of Report (month/year): 30 November 2006
II. OPENING REMARKS Provide any opening remarks that may assist in the review of this report.
This project forms part of a broader initiative to identify Important Bird Areas (IBAs) throughout Central America.
III. NARRATIVE QUESTIONS 1.
What was the initial objective of this project?
The primary objective of the project was to identify and map Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in Belize and Guatemala as defined by global criteria developed by BirdLife International. This corresponds to Investment Priority 2.4 in the CEPF ecosystem profile for Northern Mesoamerica: “Analysis to identify the location of priority sites for increased protection; laying groundwork for declaration of new private and public protected areas; support for identifying sources of funding to manage these areas”. 2. Did the objectives of your project change during implementation? If so, please explain why and how. The project objectives did not change during project implementation. However, as a result of the extension granted to the project we were able to advance further than originally anticipated with the use of IBAs as a baseline for the definition of KBAs. This was achieved through a joint IBA-KBA symposium and associated side meetings, coorganized by BirdLife International, the SGO, and Conservation International during the X meeting of the Mesoamerican Society for Biology and Conservation (SMBC), in Antigua, Guatemala (1-2 November 2006). During this joint meeting, IBA and KBA leads in each country were able to discuss the best approaches for building from IBAs to KBAs, and covered topics from data management and sharing through to whether KBA polygons should replace IBA polygons.
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