IUCN/SSC Otter Specialist Group Bulletin
©IUCN/SCC Otter Specialist Group
Volume 37 Issue 4 (December 2020)
Note from the Editor
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Dear Friends, Colleagues and Otter Enthusiasts!
This is my last editorial in this strange year 2020 that asked most of us to a change in life and work style. I hope that you all are in good spirit and that we will see an improvement of the situation thanks to the starting vaccinations.
This is already issue number 4 of 2020. In addition, we had 3 special issues with updated and new bibliographies which we have now for 4 otter species. Furthermore, we opened the special issue for the Proceedings from our last international colloquium in China in 2018. Overall, this is a very exciting development and shows that our work is appreciated in the community.
I want to use this opportunity and express my special thanks to Gerard Schmidt and Claudio Chehebar for their tremendous work with the ever-increasing number of translations of the abstracts into French and Spanish. Merci! Gracias!
I would also like to mention to all future authors that abstracts in additional languages will be included if provided by the authors. I think it can be very important to have abstracts in the local language to reach a larger auditorium.
I also would like to thank the reviewers of 2020 for their very important contribution to keep up the standard of the published manuscript. Thanks a lot to Atul Borker, Bosco Chan, Anwaruddin Choudhury, Padma de Silva, Will Duckworth, Nicole Duplaix, Katrina Fernandez, Vania Fonseca, Nishikant Gupta, Syed Ainul Hussain, Gandhiv Kafle, Andreas Kranz, Miriam Marmontel, Roland Melisch, Alexey Oleynikov, Nisarg Prakash, Carolina Ribas, Hiroshi Sasaki, Melissa Savage, Anthony Sebastian, Sanjan Thapa, Peter Urban and Heike Weber. I hope I have not forgotten anybody. I also want to mention that our reviewers are usually very supportive especially when it comes to manuscripts submitted by young or unexperienced authors.
A last comment refers to an increasing submission of photo observations. I observe an increasing submission of photographic records of otters. In order to avoid disappointments, I ask the authors to carefully consider whether these pictures have a novelty? I will double-check this with senior experts from the area. In addition, submission information should contain GPS location data too be sure that pictures are correctly assigned. This information will not be published but used in the review process to ensure authenticity of the data.
Thank you, Lesley, for all the endless hours spend with the preparation of manuscripts to put them online and to check for still overlooked typos and missing references
