Our project highlight of the week was conducted by Willy Herrera in the Philipines: Camera Traps to Uncover Information About the Elusive Medium-Sized Mammals of the Bulusan Volcano National Park. Guess what IDEA Wild donated? Yup, camera traps. 8 of 'em. Summary: Located at the southeast corner of Luzon Island in the Philippines, the Bulusan Volcano National Park is notable for being a center of biodiversity. These 9,000 acres of protected rainforest have three peaks: the active Mount Bulusan volcano, the Aguingay Lake (with water that dries up in summer), and Lake Bulusan (a famous tourist destination). The Park supports the needs of the nearby communities through its forest products, watershed, and recreational values. Sadly, the natural habitat of the Park is continually declining as a result of extensive slash and burn activities, fuel wood gathering, and illegal logging by the local community. Its biodiversity includes many threatened and restricted-range species but Master’s student Willy Herrera is focused on three: Philippine warty pig, Philippine brown deer, and Luzon giant cloud rat. While BirdLife International claims that all three of these heavily hunted mammals have been recorded on Mount Bulusan, the local government has no existing evidence. To address this gap, Willy is working with the local high school and the city Natural Environment Resources Office to equip and train students on using camera traps to uncover information about these elusive species. The school-based environmental and tourism program is engaging students in managing the collection of the raw data, including image organization, species identification and record tabulation, and data exploration and visualization. This strategy will enable the local students to collaborate with local officials – urging further research on population size and distribution, developing ecotourism and conservation materials, and helping create conservation plans to specifically highlight these three species. (fb)

Our project highlight of the week comes to us from Mongolia, conducted by Uuganbayar Ganbold: Reduce Conflicts Between Wolves and Nomadic Herders in Hustai National Park. We are pleased to have donated binoculars and a parabolic microphone. Summary: Hustai National Park (HNP) is a self-funded, non-profit park located in central Mongolia. Its overall goal is to reintroduce the only wild horse left, build up a sufficient population that can survive in the wild into the future, and effectively conserve the HNP ecosystem and other species. In addition, the HNP administration focuses on the development of local people and improvement of their livelihoods. Mongolia is home to many nomadic communities with nearly half of the country’s population roaming the steppes and moving their camps several times each year. These herders rely almost entirely on their domestic livestock for subsistence. Historically, grey wolves have been poached heavily due to nomadic herders losing their income/livestock to wolves. In recent years, local herders have hired professional poachers with powerful guns and rugged cars. Since 2015, HNP has been intensively combating poachers, both professional and local herders. While it is illegal to kill wolves anywhere in Mongolia, most locals wonder why as they do not understand that wolves play a key role in ecosystem health by helping keep herbivore populations in check, which in turn benefits many other plant and animal species. Uuganbayar Ganbold, senior wildlife restoration manager for HNP, is learning from the numerous examples around the world of ecosystems changing once the wolf is extinct. He is aiming to implement strategies to save the grey wolf and nomadic livelihoods at the same time. He is first conducting a survey and mapping wolf habitat selection. Then he is developing a management proposal, introducing study results to local herders, and training coexistence techniques when a herder’s camp overlaps wolf habitat - all with the aim to reduce conflicts and wolf mortality. (fb)