There is a large amount of literature on the ecology and conservation of the saiga antelope, mostly in Russian, but it is scattered in a wide range of local, national and international publications including conference proceedings, theses and internal reports. Much of it is inaccessible to saiga researchers and conservationists.
This project involves scanning at least 300 articles of saigas and creating pdfs of them, which will be stored in an electronic database. Each entry in the database will also have a short abstract in Russian and English with key words and details about the publication and authors.
This project is very timely because many more people are becoming interested in saiga conservation and research. It is important that we collate and archive our existing knowledge about the species so that valuable information is not lost, and so that all those with an interest in saigas (particularly within the range states) have free access to that information.