The number of common hamsters in Germany is decreasing due to changed land use practices. The federal programme Biodiversity includes measures to protect the common hamster in order to stop this trend. To assess the effectiveness of these measures the promoter of the project, the German Wildlife Foundation (Deutsche Wildtierstiftung), commissioned the IfLS to carry out an evaluation.
The evaluation is planned along four steps. Firstly, the IfLS is going to develop a questionnaire to interview farmers concerning the measures they implement to protect the common hamster on their land. In a second step, agri-environment-climate measures that are relevant for the protection of the common hamster are going to be identified. The effectiveness of these measures is going to be analyzed through interviews with experts from politics and associations. A further step is going to be the evaluation of the change of the state of knowledge of volunteers who map common hamster dens and are trained to do so. Lastly, the IfLS is going to measure the success of an “atlas of the common hamster” – a website to raise awareness for the common hamster protection.
The results of the different analyses are going to be published in an evaluation report.