8 Mar 2011. Government economists seek scientific guidance in reducing human-monkey conflict, following inappropriate procedures.
The Sri Lanka Department of Economic Development, Community Development and Livelihood Improvement Project, under the Gemidiriya Foundation and funded by the World Bank, has put a stop to recent translocations of monkeys. They have invited scientific input following irregularities in the translocation of macaques from the wet-zone hills of Badulla, Sri Lanka, into the lowland dry-zone Maduru Oya National Park. The translocation was intended to remove crop-raiding macaques from villages near Badulla. However, the intervention did not follow IUCN guidelines, resulted in monkey deaths as well as the release monkeys of one subspecies into the habitat of another – a step that undermines genetic biodiversity. At a meeting with representatives of the World Bank, Department of Wildlife Conservation, the universities, and the Department of Economic Development, Dr. Dittus had  reviewed the rationale for different methods to ameliorate human-monkey conflict and presented a plan that would reduce such conflict in the short and long terms without involving translocation or other methods inimical to monkeys and humans alike.

26 April 2011.  Dr. Dittus is a member of the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group. At the invitation of the Biodiversity Secretariat, Ministry of Environment, Government of Sri Lanka, he participated in a workshop for the revision of the IUCN Red List for all the mammals of Sri Lanka.

There is high variance in the availability of field data for different mammalian taxa concerning their geographic distribution and abundance in Sri Lanka.  Earlier work by Dittus and colleagues (e.g.CAMP 2003), however, had provided sufficient detail about primates to allow assessments at the level of the 12 different subspecies of the 5 species of Sri Lankan primates.  This is important for conservation management considerations because IUCN Red List criteria applied at the level of subspecies would require a revision of earlier government assessments made at the level of the primate species only. It is hoped that the new finer grained focus would raise the level of protection afforded some of these taxa.