Welcome to Lemurs of Madagascar and the Comoros

This project is an homage to Prof. F. Bourlière, Prof. R. Paulian and Dr. P.J.H. van Bree.

The CD-ROM 'Lemurs of Madagascar and the Comoros' is made for educational purpose only.

The project was initiated by Dr. Ferren McIntyre, who worked at ETI until his retirement in 1997. He worked at ETI as a programmer and has been responsible for many different parts of the Linnaeus software (see the topic 'Introduction' of the Help menu), especially IdentifyIt. To keep feeling with the software, each programmer at ETI started his own project, using one's own data set to fill the program. Fond of lemurs and Madagascar, Ferren took the IUCN Red Data Book 'Lemurs of Madagascar and the Comoros' (Harcourt and Thornback, 1990) as a start. In several topics of the 'Introduction' module, texts written by Ferren can be found indicated by '--FM'.

The moment Ferren left our organization, the project was given to Drs. Jan-Herman van der Sloot, who soon realized that the help of Prof. Jean-Jacques Petter could be of great importance to improve the contents of the CD-ROM. Jean-Jacques has been studying lemurs since 1956 and still actively tries to protect them, among others by means of the organization Conservatoire Vivant des Mascareignes.

With the IUCN Red Book as a framework, most of Jean-Jacques's knowledge and data has been entered into the program, expanded with data from other scientists, who are credited in the 'Contributors' field of this module.

If at first glance, the data may appear to be arranged rather unordered, we refer to the topic ' About this CD-ROM' of the 'Introduction' module to get better insight of the different modules of the program and of the data within those modules.

This CD-ROM is a project in progress, therefor we actively solicit scientists to contact us to provide us with additional data, to inform us when parts of the data need updating or should be corrected or to assist to improve the quality of this work.