Chair: Bruce Shwedick, USA

Vice Chair: Colin Stevenson, UK/Australia

Mission Statement

The Tomistoma Task Force, within the IUCN/SSC Crocodile Specialist Group, is dedicated to:

• quantifying the status of Tomistoma schlegelii in the wild
• identifying the threats to which they are exposed
• promoting appropriate actions in cooperation with range states that may achieve sustainable conservation benefits for the species.

Task Force

Tomistoma Task Force was established at the 16th Working Meeting of the IUCN-SSC Crocodile Specialist Group in Gainesville (Florida, 7-10 October 2002).

It was agreed that people outside the range states needed to play a much more active role in cooperating with and assisting range states to conserve Tomistoma — assistance with surveys, training, education, research, conservation action and both financial and human resources.

For almost 20 years now, TTF have arranged, part-funded and facilitated surveys within Tomistoma range states so that we can more fully understand the current status of the species. There remains much work to do!

We have worked with many researchers to carry out these surveys, mainly from the USA, Australia and Europe. Over the past few years, focus has changed in that we’ve been trying to assist researchers within the range of Tomistoma, with capacity building workshops run in 2017 (Sumatra) and 2019 (Kalimantan). Full reports from these workshops are available on the CSG website, here and here.

Participants in the 2019 workshop in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo