Group for the Rehabilitation of Native Fauna and their Habitat (GREFA)<\/a>, a non-governmental non-profit organisation founded in 1981 in Majadahonda, in the Community of Madrid. We look in particular at its project on the European pond turtle (Emys orbicularis<\/i>), a freshwater turtle whose range runs from North Africa to northern Europe and Central Asia.<\/p>\nAlongside the various projects this conservation NGO runs, GREFA treats a great many animals each year at its Wildlife Hospital.<\/p>\n
The situation in Spain<\/b><\/p>\n
In Spain the European pond turtle has a patchy, fragmented distribution and is classified as \u201cVulnerable\u201d, and as \u201cEndangered\u201d in the Community of Madrid, owing to a range of threats: the loss and alteration of its habitat (chiefly streams, lagoons and ponds), the growing isolation of its populations, poaching for the pet trade, invasive alien species and the appearance of new pathogens in the wild.<\/p>\n
To counter this dire situation, GREFA has led a project to conserve and recover the species since 2012. It runs along several lines of work, notably the rehabilitation of individual animals at the Wildlife Hospital, captive breeding and rearing, the study of habitats and wild populations, land stewardship on private estates, and environmental education.<\/p>\n
GREFA’s Wildlife Hospital<\/b><\/p>\n
GREFA’s Wildlife Hospital receives a great many patients of different species each year and is central to the conservation of the European pond turtle, which it has treated since it opened, caring for wild animals with injuries and illnesses of every kind. It also provides veterinary support for captive breeding work and for the upkeep of the breeding stock.<\/p>\n
While it is essential to act on the habitat and to protect adult animals, captive breeding is a valuable tool that makes it possible to act in specific situations and to reintroduce animals into the wild.<\/p>\n
At GREFA’s centre in Majadahonda, adult European pond turtles that came into the Wildlife Hospital and could not be released are kept on, which means the organisation holds both a breeding stock and a genetic reservoir.<\/p>\n
The captive breeding programme is among the most prominent strands of the project. It too began in 2012, with the fine-tuning of every technique required, since the European pond turtle is a very delicate species and a great many factors have to be taken into account and controlled. GREFA’s technique is now highly refined and allows between 60 and 70 young to be reared each year.<\/p>\n
The captive breeding programme<\/b><\/p>\n
The process begins with the incubation of the eggs, both naturally and artificially. After hatching, and for roughly a year, the young enter what is known as \u201cheadstarting\u201d, in which they are kept in captivity in optimal conditions for growth and development. This ensures a higher survival rate among the animals released, since in the wild hatchlings and young suffer heavy predation because of their small size.<\/p>\n
To date, 209 captive-bred juveniles have been released into the wild since the project began. Monitoring those animals is essential to assessing how well the breeding programme is working.<\/p>\n
The results so far allow a very positive assessment of the releases: every animal was in apparently good health and body condition, with high recapture rates. On top of that, some of the recaptured animals have gone from juveniles to subadults and even adults \u2014 no small thing, since in this species that takes a considerable time.<\/p>\n
The project also involves intensive study of wild populations and habitats at three sites of importance to the species in the Community of Madrid: the southern slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, the Cuenca Alta del Manzanares Regional Park, and the Regional Park of the Middle Course of the River Guadarrama and its surroundings \u2014 areas where the European pond turtle, and the Mediterranean turtle too, have been recorded at various locations.<\/p>\n
As a complement to the fieldwork, land stewardship is a growing tool in biodiversity conservation, since it makes it possible to work by mutual agreement with the owners of private estates to protect the species living on them.<\/p>\n
Since 2015 GREFA has acted as a stewardship body for more than 300 ha in the Cuenca Alta del Manzanares Regional Park.<\/p>\n
At CMI we celebrate and support projects such as GREFA’s for their hard work in conserving biodiversity and protecting the planet.<\/p>\n
This work often goes unseen, which is why we invite you to find out about it on their website<\/a> and to support their projects by becoming a member or making small donations, which make a great difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The second instalment of this series looks at the work of GREFA in Majadahonda and at some of its projects to conserve threatened species. In this new part of CMI’s species conservation campaign we turn to the work of the Group for the Rehabilitation of Native Fauna and their Habitat (GREFA), a non-governmental non-profit organisation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":390,"featured_media":4023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-coverage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/390"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmi.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}