The focus: we defend our endangered animal species!

The focus: we defend our endangered animal species!

Berlin, Deutschland - March 3, 2025 is all about the world's protection, and in Germany too, special attention is paid to the garden sleeper. This threatened Kleinmaki with its characteristic Zorro mask is only at home in Europe and suffers from a drastic decline in its habitat. The BUND for the Environment and Nature Conservation Germany (BUND) and the Bilch experts of the Justus Liebig University Gießen (JLU) have collected valuable data in their joint project "Searching for the Garden Slop" to secure the stocks of ART. The World Nature Protection Union (IUCN) has classified the garden sleeper as "endangered" since it was previously on the pre -warning list. This classification was necessary because the actual spread of the garden sleeper had hardly been researched over the years, as Oekonews.at reported.

In the past 50 years, the distribution area of ​​the garden sleeper has dramatically reduced - by about a third! This is an alarm sign that requires further measures. The “Spurens search garden sleeper” project, which runs from 2018 to the end of 2024, examined the causes of this decline and developed a comprehensive protection concept. Genetic analyzes and the documentation of habitats as well as food habits flow into a national gendat database. In addition, volunteer “garden sleepers” are mobilized to support the way in monitoring, which promotes citizen science, as the Federal Office for Nature Conservation (BFN) explained.

survey of stocks and protective measures

The project initiators have set up an online registration office through which thousands of evidence of the garden sleeper could be documented. This created a current distribution card for Germany. The information collected is crucial in order to develop and implement concrete measures to maintain the population in the different habitats of the species. The collected data not only prove the decline, but also the ecological differences between the occurrences in the lowlands and in the low mountain ranges, which in turn underlines the urgency of the project, as bfn.de explained.