LARGE MALE ORANGUTAN RESCUED FROM THREATENED TRIPA PEAT SWAMP FORESTS, ACEH, INDONESIA

Issued by: Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme and BKSDA Aceh.

Medan, October 15, 2012

A large, fully adult male Sumatran Orangutan weighing around 90 kg was rescued yesterday (14/10/12) from an isolated forest fragment in the Tripa Peat Swamp Forests in the Nagan Raya District of Aceh Province, Sumatra, Indonesia, as illegal destruction of this unique ecosystem by rogue palm oil companies continues.

Thanks to the cooperation of a team of experts from the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry’s Department of Forest Protection and Nature Conservation (PHKA), the orangutan, later named Seuneam after the nearest village to where he was found, was evacuated safely and later released early on Monday morning (15/10/12) at the SOCP’s specialist Orangutan Reintroduction Centre in the Jantho Pine Nature Reserve in northern Aceh. Seuneam had been monitored in the field by SOCP staff for several days and had to be rescued as he was trapped in a small fragment of forest surrounded by palm oil plantations, isolated from the rest of the Tripa swamp forests and the rest of Tripa’s surviving orangutan population, estimated today to be only around 200 individuals, and declining fast. Local informants even stated that there was a plan to poison him very soon if he continued to destroy young palm oil seedlings.

The team in the field comprised SOCP veterinarians, staff of BKSDA Aceh (the Government’s provincial Conservation Agency), staff of the Indonesian Sustainable Ecosystem Foundation (Yayasan Ekosistem lestari, or YEL) and local community members.

Head of BKSDA Aceh, Mr Amon Zamora MSc, stated on Sunday evening “BKSDA Aceh strongly supports this orangutan rescue and I hope that other orangutans facing similar threats in Tripa can also be rescued before they are killed, or die of malnutrition. Evacuation efforts like this are essential to our efforts to save the Sumatran orangutan and reduce conflicts with local communities. It's a sad fact that orangutans are often regarded as pests by people and plantation companies, as when they have no other food to eat they can and do eat and damage agricultural crops.

Meanwhile, head of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, Dr Ian Singleton stated "We are always happy to see a successful rescue take place, but these activities are expensive, logistically challenging and also dangerous, for both staff and the orangutans themselves. There is always a serious risk of injury to the animals during capture, especially when they fall from the trees after being anaesthetized. We would much prefer not to have to intervene in this way and in reality we should not be having to rescue orangutans from Tripa, as it is part of the Leuser Ecosystem, now a protected area under National Spatial Planning laws. In fact, several of the palm oil companies operating in Tripa are already under investigation for breaking Indonesian Law and one plantation has even be cancelled. But regrettably, forest clearance, drainage of the peatlands and burning of the land continue unabated, so we have no choice but to rescue orangutans when they will clearly die if we don’t".

"Both locally, and Globally, people were inspired recently by the strong leadership of new Aceh Governor, Dr Zaini Abdullah, when the Aceh Government revoked an illegal oil palm plantation permit granted to PT Kalista Alam. But despite this, it is still clear to see that rogue palm oil companies are continuing to destroy Tripa’s remaining forests, creating more conflicts between human and orangutan, and other wildlife. It's not the orangutans that should be leaving this area, it is the palm oil companies who are breaking the law." Dr Singleton added.

Drh Yenny Saraswati reiterated during a quiet moment after Seuneam’s eventual return to the wild. “Rescues like this are not something we enjoy. There are serious risks of injury and even death to an orangutan like this during capture, however good modern equipment and drugs are these days. No matter what you do, orangutans climb higher when afraid, and then fall all the way to the ground. We have had several break bones in the past as a result of falls, even though we always try to get a capture net underneath them beforehand. As a veterinarian, its not pleasant to have to take such risks with an animal’s welfare”.

The Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP; www.sumatranorangutan.org ) is a collaborative programme involving the Swiss based PanEco Foundation (www.paneco.ch ), Indonesia’s Yayasan Ecosystem Lestari (www.yelweb.org ) and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry’s Directorate General of Forest Protection and Nature Conservation (DitJen PHKA; www.dephut.go.id )

Main activities of the SOCP include:-

1. Confiscation, quarantine, and reintroduction to the wild of illegal pet Sumatran orangutans
2. Research and monitoring of remaining wild Sumatran orangutan populations
3. Habitat protection and conservation
4. Conservation education and awareness raising


To date the SOCP as returned to the wild more than 180 illegal captive orangutans and rescued a number of orangutans in similar situations to Seuneam.

For further information contact:-

1. Mr Amon Zamora, MSc, Kepala BKSDA Aceh, Tel: +6282169313999, Email: amonzamora@gmail.com

2. Dr Ian Singleton, Director of Conservation PanEco Foundation / Head of SOCP, Tel: +62811650491, Email: mokko123@gmail.com

Website: www.sumatranorangutan.org
Website: www.paneco.ch
Blog: IanSingletonSOCP.wordpress.com/

Orangutans dying as demand for palm oil soars

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From instant noodles to ice cream, palm oil is found in roughly half of all packaged supermarket products. Demand for the product has led to the destruction of Indonesian jungles which are home to a large number of wild orangutans. NBC News Correspondent Ian Williams travels to Indonesia and follows a man fighting to save one of our closest relatives.

BELO MONTE IS STOPPED !!!!! « Indigenous Brazil

In a historic trial in the evening this Monday (13/8) the Fifth Chamber of the Federal Regional Court 1st region ruled by unanimity the stoppage of the works of the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex. The measure was taken by the TRF when judging a resource of embargo promoted by the Federal Public Ministry (MPF). The fine provided for if the determination is not fulfilled is r $ 500 thousand per day. The decision of the fifth class was based on article 1, item 2 of International Labour Organization (ILO), which determines a prior consultation to the main affected by works: indigenous communities, who live on site. This consultation shall be held solely by the National Congress, which according to judge Souza prudent, has not occurred. As rapporteur, ignore the Belo Monte plant would be irresponsibleTrial that can stop the Belo Monte plant construction is suspended”The National Congress issued Legislative Decree No. 788 of 2005 without listening to indigenous communities, such as the ILO and paragraph 3 of the Brazilian Constitution, authorizing the beginning of works and ordering that a posthumous study,” said the judge. “However, the Constitution does not authorize a study posthumously, but yes, a preliminary study. So given by Ibama licensing is invalid, “he added. The judge stressed that Souza Prudent to query is essential when dealing with Indians of the construction of a complex as this. In addition, the measure is supported in article 231, and paragraphs of the Brazilian Constitution, which establishes a special protection to indigenous lands, their stories and customs. “The Indians are human beings who have the same rights of any Brazilian citizen. In addition, the works of Belo Monte endanger the aviation of the 7 Falls waterfall, “says the judge.

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A New Satellite Tool Tracks Deforestation - NYTimes.com

Green, A Blog about Energy and the Environment, June 25, 2012, 2:31 PM
By RACHEL NUWER

http://www.terra-i.org/Karolina Argote/Louis Reymondin

An international team of researchers presented a new tool at the Rio+20 sustainability conference last week: the first satellite system for monitoring deforestation across Latin America in nearly real time. While such programs have existed in Brazil for several years, the program, called Terra-I, fills a much-needed gap for some smaller Latin countries that are losing forests at an equal or higher rate.

“Everyone more or less understands maps,” said Mark Mulligan, a geographer at King’s College London and one of the project’s designers. “Having dynamic maps that show where forest loss is occurring is more effective than statistics you always hear about — ‘we’ve lost another patch of forest the size of Wales.’ ” Now, he said, people can visualize exactly where and how quickly that forest was felled, including which towns or protected areas that it lay near.

The project is a collaboration, involving Dr. Mulligan; a graduate student, Louis Reymondin; the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia; the Nature Conservancy; and the School of Engineering and Management of Vaud in Switzerland.

Using NASA’s Modis satellite sensor, it depicts land changes every 16 days at a resolution of 250 square meters (about 2,700 square feet) on the ground. The constantly updated maps are freely available online as a simple overlay on a Google map or formatted for more sophisticated Web mapping software. “People familiar with Google Maps can just look down at their own areas,” Dr. Mulligan said. “And we provide the data so others who have methods for manipulating geodata can actually do further things with the data than we’ve done.”

Preliminary results revealed that the effects of deforestation in parts of Colombia have more than quadrupled, increasing by 340 percent since 2004. More than a million hectares (2.5 million acres) of forest have been felled in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco region. “I think the Gran Chaco results are quite surprising — there’s much greater deforestation than we expected,” Dr. Mulligan said.

For Terra-I to work, the researchers had to train the system to differentiate between seasonal changes in vegetation and human-induced impacts. They developed a computational neural network and taught the program to recognize those changes with old data from 2004 to 2005.

Brazil in particular was a good starting point for teaching the machine, since large swaths of land often change from all forest to no forest. From there, the scientists are refining the system to distinguish between visual obstacles like cloud cover and flooded rivers and to home in on more sporadic deforestation.

In many parts of the world, the details of what’s being cut where and when are splotchy, making managing a given patch of forest — let alone an entire country’s holdings — tricky. Dr. Mulligan and his colleagues hope the new tool will help governments, conservationists and those drafting climate-related policies to accurately assess landscape changes and make decisions — how to balance livelihoods and food security with biodiversity conservation, for example, or how to design more eco-efficient agriculture.

Now that monitoring for Latin America is up and running, the team is working on systems for Asia and Africa. Those areas are proving more challenging, though: forests there often occur in disconnected patches rather than one green blanket, and deforestation tends to be carried out by small-scale individual operations rather than large corporations.

Still, they are working on methods to improve their algorithms so they can better function in an African or Asian context. They are also brainstorming on ways to bolster their computing power, since continuously running an analysis of each pixel of data taken every 250 square meters on the continental scale is “hugely computationally intensive,” Dr. Mulligan said.

The Rio+20 attendees and others seemed to respond favorably to Terra-I’s debut, Dr. Mulligan said, with the Web site logging around 2,300 hits on the first day of the conference. “The best way to improve a system is to get people to use it,” he said, although so far most people have just taken a quick look. “It takes time for people to come back after figuring out, O.K., now what can I do with it?”