Dr. Leah Karrer from CI using the mapping mangroves tool with Qatari students, Omar and Ahmad
Last week Qatari 11th-grader, Hussam Sayed and his friends couldn’t tell you what a dugong is — even though hundreds of these charismatic manatee-like creatures live in the nearby Persian Gulf.
But by the end of the morning on Saturday, April 21, Hussam and a dozen other Qatari high school students could identify much more than the dugong after collecting flora and fauna data in the Al Thakhira mangrove forest on Qatar’s eastern coastline.
As part of last weekend’s Earth Day activities in Doha, Conservation International (CI) helped Qatar Foundation International (QFI) and the students make the trek to test out a new online tool called Mapping the Mangroves, which was designed by QFI to track the biodiversity of coastal ecosystems and raise public awareness about this vital habitat.
