BBC Go Wild

The BBC Wildlife Fund grant has helped the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation pay for a new floating boat camp, which was used to patrol the river, run by one full-time boatman and assistant. The camp provided a home from which forest officers could mount regular long-ranging patrols two or three times each week. Forest staff could also launch small dinghies from the floating camps, allowing them to patrol the local area on a daily basis. Funds also went towards the on-going project and equipping the park rangers with radios so that they can report incidents and call for reinforcements.

Based in Palangka Raya within the Central Kalimantan region of Indonesian Borneo the project is home to some 650 orang-utans, making it the largest primate rehabilitation centre in the world. The BBC Wildlife Fund grant helped in three key areas: helping to deliver education and raise awareness, allowing the project to bring local children to visit the centre and its work at least once a week; a programme that confiscates captive orang-utans; and helped pay for a much needed microbiology lab that is used to perform health checks on all apes that join the centre.

The BBC Wildlife Fund grant helped the award-winning Saving the Critically Endangered Siamese Crocodile project, which was established in 2000 to save these rarest of creatures and their globally important wetland habitat. It has developed a strategy to boost the captive breeding of the Siamese crocodile and help reintroduce the animals into the wild. It aimed to reduce threats to wild crocodiles from poaching and habitat loss and strengthen the role of indigenous local communities in protecting crocodiles and wetlands.

The country’s beaches are important nesting grounds for five of the seven species of marine turtle, but they are threatened by development, egg poachers and fishing gear, in which they become entangled. The beaches of Rekawa are particularly important, and the BBC Wildlife Fund has helped local communities benefit from preserving the turtles, by continuing the Turtle Conservation Project’s turtle work and establishing alternative income generation schemes within local villages.

The Wildlife Conservation Society and London Zoological Society are working to restore a unique tract of prime tiger habitat in the Western Ghats region of India. The grant from the BBC Wildlife Fund helped them to voluntarily resettle families outside of the areas where tigers and other rare wildlife live. This reduced fragmentation of habitats and human-wildlife conflicts. The project is a pioneer for India - conservation models that realistically attempt to address the driving forces of habitat fragmentation have been quite rare, particularly in Asia. By helping people move from where tigers live, to places with better facilities, they are restoring the ecosystem, safeguarding the tiger’s future and helping meet the needs of the local communities.

The grant has been used to gather scientific data, to help encourage local communities conserve marine life in the Philippines and protect sites important for seahorses. Surveys have revealed that seahorses within protected areas are larger and greater in number than those living outside, providing clear objective evidence that populations can thrive where seahorse fishing is banned. Using seahorses as a focus the Seahorse Project has been adding to the number and range of Marine Protected Areas in the central Philippines. A new important reserve is centred on the Danajon Bank, the only documented barrier reef in Southeast Asia. The project has also used the funding to increase its monitoring of seahorse populations all around the islands.

If the Sumatran rhino is to be saved, three things need to be achieved: surviving wild populations must be protected, rhinos must be encouraged to breed in managed sanctuaries and the animal’s natural habitat must be safeguarded. The BBC Wildlife Fund project contributed towards all three objectives. Save the Rhino International is continuing work to stop the Sumatran rhino becoming the first of the five existing modern rhino species to become extinct.

The world’s largest bivalve, the giant clam Tridacna gigas has been driven close to extinction in the waters around Borneo. These waters have been overfished for decades. This project, with support from the Fund, has worked with local fishermen to see if it is possible to secure the future of the clam by turning it into a commodity. By creating a clam ranch, the project has helped enable local people to make money from the giant clam but reducing the pressure on this wonderful creature in its natural home.

Protecting rainforests isn’t enough if we do not know how the animals within are faring. In Borneo, the Fund helped conservationists and local people count the populations of two rare apes, the Bornean orang utan and the Bornean agile gibbon. Only by understanding how populations of these flagship species have changed can it be assessed whether efforts to conserve the forest are paying off. Run by the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, the project identified 17 locations where the habitats and populations of these great apes could be monitored. Baseline figures for orang utans and agile gibbons were counted and the proportion of local trees that provide food for both species calculated. Local staff and students were trained in how to survey the apes, and guided by a specially produced DVD detailing survey techniques and experiences shared by experts.

This project supported by the Fund aims to effectively protect orang utans in two priority landscapes for orang utan conservation in West Kalimantan through improved, collaborative law enforcement (based on community ranger schemes), improved protected area management, improved spatial planning to reduce conversion of forests to palm plantations and through development of sustainable forest management for orang utan habitat under timber concession licences.

WildAid's partnership with AirMedia aims to raise awareness amongst a key consuming market and to reduce the demand for wildlife parts and products in China, with a special focus on sharks and shark fin soup. BBC Wildlife Funds were used to create short in-flight movies highlighting the plight of key species, which have been shown over 1.1 million times on over 18,000 passenger screens on commercial flights within the target area. This work will continue, with the aim to create a new, active and powerful constituency for conservation in the country.

Rhino Protection Units (RPUs) are highly-trained, four-person anti-poaching teams. The goals of the RPU programme, supported by the Fund, are to prevent the extinction of Sumatran rhinos and other threatened species, and to protect critical habitats in Sumatra. Proactive prevention of poaching and habitat destruction is the main objective of the RPU programme and this is achieved by the intensive protection of surviving Sumatran rhino populations: project workers deactivate traps and snares and identify and apprehend illegal intruders, including poachers, and investigate crime scenes, thus preventing or reducing the loss of wildlife. The RPU programme also works to ensure that local communities living in closest proximity to the parks serve as active partners in wildlife protection and reap direct benefits from conservation efforts. With partners, alternative income generation and education programmes for local communities living near rhino areas are delivered.

While the rhino is still severely threatened, losses through poaching and encroachment have been successfully reduced.

The support of the BBC Wildlife Fund helped the project establish a pilot participatory reforestation programme, creating ecological corridors between fragmented forest patches in montane areas. Targeting redundant scrubland (formerly forest) on degraded areas of existing tea and pine plantations, 'new' forest corridors (comprising native species) was established, and working with the Forest Department (of Sri Lanka) and plantation owners and local stakeholders community benefits were delivered and loris conservation enhanced.

The overall aim of this project is to strengthen the conservation of a key population of elephants and their habitat in Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary by facilitating the involvement of local communities in collaborative protection, sustainable resource use and forest restoration.

Work on sustainable livelihoods offers real hope that coexistence can be achieved and maintained into the future.

BBC Wildlife Fund support was provided to secure three high-density breeding populations of snow leopard and their prey, one each in China, India and Mongolia, the three countries with the largest remaining snow leopard populations in the world. A key aim is complete cessation of the illegal poaching of endangered species including snow leopard, wild yak, and argali, contributing to stable breeding populations and improved environmental health (e.g. regrowth of grasslands), with all the associated benefits for native biodiversity including avifauna, voles, pikas, marmots, invertebrates and rare plants. The project works closely with local stakeholders and also seeks international cooperation to reduce new threats, particularly mining, in snow leopard habitat. Work on this species has been taken by this project from the local to the regional in scale.