Prague, Nov 12 (CTK) – The Nature Conservation Agency (AOP) plans to buy cameras and also drones for half a million crowns for money from European funds to better monitor the movement and occurrence of large beasts of prey that are returning to the Czech landscape, daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) writes yesterday.
It writes that a wild animal strikingly resembling a wolf has been moving around the Broumov landscape protected area in north-eastern Bohemia over the past several weeks.
Other large beasts of prey are returning and environmentalists have confirmed the occurrence of bears and lynxes, HN writes.
“We want to instal some 50 photo traps in the Beskydes Mountains (north Moravia) and the White Carpathians (south-eastern Moravia) to monitor large beasts of prey next year,” AOP director Frantisek Pelc told HN.
The environmentalists want to map the migration paths of the animals and see whether they cross roads or railways somewhere and how they use the animal bridges spanning motorways and other heavy traffic roads.
“The transport network distinctly influences the occurrence of large beasts of prey in the Czech Republic,” Karolina Sulova, AOP spokeswoman said.
That is why the environmentalists will try to prevent the building of new roads where the animals are moving, she said.
The large animals will be similarly followed in six other countries of the Carpathian Convention in which governments pledged to protect the sustainable development of the Carpathians, HN writes.
The signatories of the convention of 2003 are besides the Czech Republic also Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine.
Some new photo traps are to be added to the existing 30 that the agency together with the Science Academy has planted in the Beskydes.
Thanks to the photo traps planted in the Kokorin vicinity in central Bohemia, the AOP found out last year that wolves had young for the first time in more than a century in the country last year, Pelc said.
Wolves became extinct in the Czech Lands at the end of the 19th century. It is said that the last was shot dead in the Sumava Mountains, south-west Bohemia, in 1874, HN writes.
However, they have reappeared in the past 20 years. They come to the country from Poland, Germany and Slovakia, HN writes.
Besides cameras, the AOP also wants to buy drones for the new protected landscape area of Brdy to monitor the state of the forests, Pelc said.
“This would make it possible, among others, to take pictures of the same place after a lapse of time and assess how plants are changing there,” Pelc said.
The Brdy Nature Protected Landscape Area in central Bohemia will be established as from January 1, 2016, on the territory of a previous military training ground.
($1=25.218 crowns)
