Alby Schmitt, the Deputy Director for Water & Biodiversity at the French Ministry of Ecology (MEDDE), Jean-Pierre Poly, Director General of the French National Wildlife Agency (ONCFS), Jean Jalbert, Director General of the Tour du Valat, and their colleagues gathered together on 24 January 2014 to ratify an agreement that formally defined the cooperation between the three parties in the organisation, the operations and funding of the AEWA (African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement) African Initiative Technical Support Unit (TSU).
Some of the TSU offices are in the Camargue at the Tour du Valat, which helps to run this unit with the ONCFS, while the others are at the Senegal National Park Department (DPN) in Dakar. This three-way agreement will define the partnership until the end of 2015, when the sixth AEWA meeting of the parties (MOP6) takes place.
Conducted with the framework of the AEWA Plan of Action for Africa (PoAA), the TSU’s principal missions are to strengthen capacity in terms of International Waterbird Censuses (IWC) and capitalise on the data collected.
A partnership framework agreement was also signed by the ONCFS and Tour du Valat on this occasion, to officially recognise the scientific and technical collaboration to be pursued in various areas (applied research and habitat and species management support, biological inventories, wetlands management, monitoring hunting activities, and monitoring and research on species with a high heritage value) during the next three years at various geographic scales: the Camargue, France, and the Mediterranean basin.