The Plover

We recently had the pleasure of having Jane Glavan, Partnership Project Manager of the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI), walk us through what AGEDI does to help inform environmental policies, how the group put recognition on additional value of the ecosystems we love, and the importance of Blue Carbon.   The importance of the ocean to human life cannot be overstated, Jane began. Healthy oceans are key to 11 of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including the elimination of poverty, addressing the gender imbalance, ensuring food security, mitigating climate change and more. Globally, coastal zones support over 55% of the world’s population, but only account for 5% of world’s land mass, which places massive stress on them.  In the effort to protect coastal areas in the UAE, one of AGEDI’s undertakings was to help further understand the value on nature as an asset by enumerating the ‘services’ that ecosystems provide, for instanc...

Our family camping weekend on the 20 and 21st of October was really four trips in one, combining appreciation of our desert habitat with archaeology, geology and star gazing. Archaelogy   The Mleiha Archaeological Centre is a museum located next to a restored Umm Al-Nar tomb, with many other sites at various distances from the centre.  The museum itself explains the importance of the sites around Mleiha in the context of the region’s history and development. Of special note are the paleolithic hand axes excavated at Faya in 2010 that have been dated reliably to over 120,000 years old. The museum contains a hologram of one of these hand axes, designed to show that these Faya tools are closer to the contemporaneous East African handiwork of Homo Sapiens than to   Neanderthal tools from sites in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Since no Homo Sapiens fossils older than 50,000 years ago have been iden...

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Emirates Natural History Group, we set up 'The Plover' (after our mascot, the Crab Plover) to continue our mission to celebrate, record and conserve the unique habitats of the UAE, from the coast to the deserts and mountains of our home.  Follow this link to a recent article about the group's beginnings, featuring an interview with Peter Hellyer, one of our lifetime members.  Forty years after a group of dedicated (obsessed?) birdwatchers joined forces to create the ENHG, we remain a community-based organization that is passionate about the natural world.  Join us for bi-weekly lectures, amazing field trips to all corners of the region and beyond, and the company of fellow enthusiasts of the outdoors.