Combining bioacoustics and camera trapping to see how community-designed initiatives impact biodiversity in Kalimantan, Indonesia.
WildMon is excited to share an exciting new partnership and project launch with Planet Indonesia in Kalimantan, Indonesia! This project, funded by Cartier for Nature, will be the first of ours to combine bioacoustic and camera trap monitoring. The project aims to provide biodiversity data to help Indigenous and local peoples develop effective community-led solutions to address conservation and social issues.
Photo courtesy of Planet Indonesia
The Project
Project Background
Our partners at Planet Indonesia have built strong relationships with 8 Dayak communities and have helped them access various program services. These include community-led finance, public health information and services, training on climate-smart agriculture practices, and support to secure land rights through Indonesia’s Social Forestry scheme. The results from our project will inform us on the impact these initiatives have on wildlife. The partner Dayak communities can then use this biodiversity data to make informed decisions about their surrounding natural resources.
Project Area
Our project will be carried out in the Gunung Naning forests, spanning 229,000ha of the Ketapang district in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Gunung Naning is part of the Arabella-Schanner forest complex, one of the largest tracts of continuous forest in Borneo. This biologically important area hosts the largest remaining Bornean orangutan population and provides habitat for various endangered and endemic species, such as hornbills, gibbons, and pangolins. The landscape is also home to Indigenous Dayak communities, who have nurtured a strong cultural and spiritual connection with the forest and its inhabitants for centuries.
Project Partner - Planet Indonesia
Planet Indonesia is an international conservation non-profit dedicated to conserving at-risk ecosystems through community-led governance. They establish partnerships with frontline Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC) to put them back behind the wheel of determining their social-ecological trajectory. They accomplish this by embracing a holistic approach integrating access to land rights, social services, and livelihood support for IPLC through community-designed initiatives to help relieve the pressures of rural poverty and reduce barriers to participation in natural resource management and ecosystem stewardship.
Photos courtesy of Planet Indonesia
What we’ll be doing
We will deploy camera-traps and acoustic recorders at 100 sites across Guning Naning to collect biodiversity data. By using these methods together, we are able to get a better understanding of the wildlife in the area. For example, camera-traps are good for detecting terrestrial mammals like pangolins and big cats while acoustic recorders are better for detecting birds and frogs. We’ll be focusing on 60 priority species, with a particular emphasis on endangered species such as the Bornean orangutan, Sunda Pangolin, Bornean white-bearded gibbon, and helmeted hornbill. We will be sampling twice per year (to account for different seasons) for 2 years across all 8 Dayak partner villages. This will allow us to assess how community-led initiatives, led by Planet Indonesia, influence wildlife over space and time.
After deploying the devices, we will utilize AI models to detect species from camera-trap images and sound recordings. We will also conduct soundscape analyses to compare acoustic activity overall between sites. Species detections will be used in ecological analyses to understand how species presence and distribution are influenced spatially and seasonally by different community-led initiatives.
From the WildMon Team
"We are entering into a really exciting era where biodiversity assessments and conservation are going to be informed by high quality, verifiable and current data coming from a variety of sensors. This project gives us a peek into that future where local communities will be collecting information from hundreds of audio recorders and camera traps to document hundreds of species living within their lands. The partnership of Planet Indonesia and WildMon in Borneo will empower these communities to sustainably manage their lands and natural resources for their families and communities." - Dr. Jorge Ahumada, WildMon Co-founder and Chief Conservation & Impact Officer.
We’re looking forward to seeing the results from this multi-methodology project! Follow us on social media for project updates.
