For these reasons OSME, jointiy with the International Council for Bird 
Preservation (ICBP), is initiating the Important Bird Areas in the Middle 
East project, starting in September this year. 
The project will last for two years and aims to produce an inventory of 
internationally important areas for conserving birds in the Middle East, 
by drawing together published and unpublished information, including 
the OSME Sites Register, as well as the expertise of Middle Eastern 
conservation organisations and individuals so as to compile details of 
such sites in one volume. Although knowledge of the avifauna and 
wildlife habitats of the region is quite comprehensive, no previous 
attempt has been made to draw this information together, critically 
assess the value and status of sites, and then publish it. 
In recent years, similar inventories and directories of key wildlife sites 
have been published for other areas of the world and have proved to be 
successful tools for implementing conservation action (eg Grimmett and 
Jones {19S9) Important Bird Areas in Europe; Scott (1989) A directory of Asian 
wetlands). 
The following countries are included in the Middle Eastern inventory: 
Afghanistan Israel Qatar 
Bahrain Jordan Saudi Arabia 
Egypt Kuwait Syria 
Iran Lebanon United Arab Emirates 
Iraq Oman Yemen (including Socotra) 
Site identification and book compilation are being carried out by MIE, 
based at ICBP's office in Cambridge, and the project is supervised by a 
steering committee chaired by MRWR (Chairman of OSME and 
Programme Director of ICBP). For certain countries, national co-ordina tors 
will be appointed to gather information. 
Sites will be included only if they meet certain criteria; details of these are 
being drawn up now at the start of the project, but sites important for four 
groups of birds will certainly be included: 
• species at risk of total extinction (globally threatened species); 
, • species or subspecies threatened throughout all or large parts of their 
range in the Middle East but not globally; 
• species that have relatively small total world ranges with important 
populations in the Middle East; 
• regularly occurring migratory species which concentrate at and are 
dependent on particular sites either when breeding, on migration, or 
during the winter. 
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