1. Why do we want to monitor horseshoe crabs across the Asian countries?
The current distribution of Asian horseshoe crabs is not well known. We therefore want to use this monitoring website to connect horseshoe crab researchers around the world and assemble important biological data for horseshoe crab conservation. More specifically, we want to use this site to generate data for
- updating our knowledge on global horseshoe crab distribution
- building local and regional species distribution models
These guidelines should help you to participate in the effort as a collaborator and collect the necessary biological information from your region by collecting data on species occurrence, life stage, gender, density, etc from yourself as well as from colleagues, students, and hobby scientists.
2. Build up your local monitoring network, or run a student project about Horseshoe crabs
There are several ways to assemble the necessary data from your region. First you or your local colleagues may already have recorded observations. Second, you may want to go out and generate new observations, or ask your students and schoolteachers to make short field excursions in the region to map typical horseshoe crab habitats. Third, you or your students may be able to generate observation data from the literature. For all three cases we provide a DATA SHEET TEMPLATE for download at the bottom of this page. You can take a printed version of this table with you and fill it out when you are in the field. You can establish small projects around these field trips where students or school classes can design a scientific hypothesis, learn new techniques, and analyse the collected data.