The Wings Over Wetlands (WOW) Project aims to protect African-Eurasian migratory waterbirds by conserving the wetlands they rely on.
Many waterbirds migrate north from Africa and Southern Asia each spring to breed. In the fall, they make the return trip. During each migration, they rely on wetlands along the route to provide them with resting, feeding, and roosting sites. Sadly, these wetlands are disappearing as humans drain them, pollute them, or build on them. The fact that migratory birds must pass through a number of countries makes conservation of this dwindling habitat difficult—it requires international cooperation.
The Wings Over Wetlands Project (WOW) is an attempt to address this difficulty. WOW is an international partnership of conservation organizations and governments designed to help countries get the information they need, and then work cooperatively to conserve important wetlands (and with them, the world’s waterbirds). The area covered by WOW includes Africa, Europe, much of Asia, Greenland, and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
The WOW project has just launched its website, a site designed to provide information about the project, critical wetlands, and the birds involved. In the future, the site will link to tools such as the ‘Critical Sites Network Tool,’ which will link wetlands with the bird species that use them to help conservation groups determine the importance of specific wetlands.
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