Hello all,
I am currently carrying out a study into a non-native population of aesculapian snake in the UK with Dr. Wolfgang Wuster at Bangor University. We are looking at the snake's potential to spread outside it's current known range in the UK under present and possible future climates using ARC and Maxent software. We have already discovered, as far as we know, what we think are the first aesculapian snake eggs found in the UK and are looking to further broaden our knowledge of their ecology over here. We would be extremely grateful if any European herpers would be kind enough to submit locality data on their sightings of the species in its home range. We know ourselves how sensitive an issue locality data can be and any data submitted would be kept in the upmost confidence and wouldn't be stated explicitly in the final write-up. GPS data is great but if you'd rather keep it a little less specific the name of the nearest village is also fine- we just need somewhere to get climatic data for. Due to forum rules we would have to recieve these place names via email or private message. Again, I assure you we would be extremely careful with this data and very grateful to anybody who contacts us with any sightings in Europe. Could you please send records via private message to myself or to my email address: welshagamidae@hotmail.co.uk
Thanks again,
James