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(March 18, 2021) Sales of bamboo ornaments and utensils crafted by the Bamboo Producer Group in Sre Preah Community Protected Area (CPA) increased almost four times from $212 in 2019 to $806 in 2020.The reasons for this increase in income were that the Bamboo Producer Group diversified the bamboo products being made and improved their quality as a result of training delivered under the USAID KSCP, as well as behavior change in consumers who stopped using plastic items and switched to bamboo.Sre Preah Bamboo Prod...

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(June 08, 2016) A handful of Bunong indigenous villages located in or on the edge of Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary (formally known as Seima Protected Forest) are suffering from human-elephant conflict, which in this case is when elephants enter their farms and eating and/or damaging their crops. This is a recent problem with the elephants only causing this intensity of damage over the last 2 – 3 years. The likely causes of this issue are loss and disturbance of elephant habitat from forest clearance and il...

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(April 01, 2011) A new study released by the Wildlife Conservation Society reveals that the annual rate of deforestation in the Northern Plains 'conservation landscape' is significantly lower than deforestation rate in those parts of the landscape that are not the focus of conservation activities. The annual rate of forest loss for the conservation area was 0.19% between 2002 and 2010, compared to a figure almost ten times higher for the surrounding Buffer Area (1.67%).Seven main landscape features associated wi...

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(December 16, 2010) Securing land tenure will help stabilise land-use in the Seima Protection Forest (SPF). This is one of WCS and the FA's key strategies in the SPF as it will protect forests, and the wildlife that depend on them as well as maintaining critically important cultural values. The film was produced with the general assistance of Danida, DfID, NZAid and The Asia Foundation

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(December 16, 2010) This film introduces the Seima Protection Forest (SPF) and the work of the Forestry Administration (FA) to develop a program to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD).The REDD project aims to provide a sustainable source of financing for the SPF through the payment of carbon credits from avoided deforestation. This film introduces the main concepts of REDD and shows how this will benefit the globally important biodiversity and social values of the SPF.The film was produced wi...

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(November 26, 2010) Wildlife Friendly Ibis Rice is planted at the beginning of the rainy season, part of the daily life of farming families living in remote villages in or near protected areas.Once harvested, the village marketing network committee members buy rice from farmers who have followed the rules.Paddy rice is transported to a mill in Siem Reap where the milling, packaging and marketing is overseen by Sansom Mlup Prey.This video is a brief overview of the different participants in the program, from farmers...

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(August 02, 2010) The photo above show what happens when an elephant decides he does not to be photographed. This is a remote camera that was installed by a research team from the Seima Protection Forest at a mineral lick to capture images of wildlife using the area. A sequence of images was captured of two females elephants and two calves passing the camera, before an adult male followed along the same path. However, the adult male realized that the camera was present, and decided that he did not want to be phot...

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(July 22, 2010) The Wildlife Conservation Society Cambodia Program, in collaboration with World Education, Inc., have started an innovative project using literacy programs to support conservation efforts. The project began in January 2010 and is being piloted in the villages of Sre Levi and Andoung Kraloeng in the Seima Protection Forest (SPF), Mondulkiri.Preliminary investigations carried out by World Education in 2009 revealed that illiteracy and innumeracy are a significant barrier to the successful implemen...

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(July 19, 2010) The Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) work in Cambodia focuses on a suite of conservation areas including the Seima Protection Forest (SPF) in southern Mondulkiri province. Conserving these areas is however not just a question of improving their management, they also depend on the landscape that surrounds them. Asian Elephants move with the seasons, spreading widely in the wet season to search for food. Vultures travel huge distances to find carrion. For these and other species the boundarie...

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(July 19, 2010) The Civil Society and Pro-Poor Markets (CSPPM) program is a three-year project that has been operating in 13 provinces since 2007. As one component of the Multi-donor Livelihood Facility's natural resource management and livelihoods program it is designed to help support rural communities to improve the management of their natural resources. The program has three main aspects: to improve the quality of community-based natural resource management; to increase the 'voice' of communities to help th...

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(July 13, 2010) Resin tappers collect resin throughout the forests of the Northern Plains of Preah Vihear. This activity is a very important source of income for community members as resin tappers can earn US$100-600 per month. Resin tappers often disturb wildlife by camping at waterholes, they start forest fires and engage in hunting both opportunistically and commercially. Addressing the illegal activity associated with resin-tapping is necessary to improve the conservation status of the landscape. As resin-t...

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(July 06, 2010) Forestry Administration and WCS Project staff in Seima conduct regular surveys of the local communities that live in and around the Seima Protectoin Forest. The latest study describes the communities as they were in early 2008. In particular we sought to find out information on livelihoods and how many community-based organisations were present in the landscape. The report also reviews information on agri-business and mining exploration concessions, which are likely to be key drivers of demograp...

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(July 06, 2010) On August 7th 2009 the Royal Government of Cambodia's highest legislative body, the Council of Ministers declared the creation of the Seima Protection Forest (SPF). At 2,926 km2 this is the largest new protected area created in Cambodia since 2002. This development marks the culmination of over three years of lobbying on the part of SPF managers to secure additional legal support for the SPF as the draft sub-decree was reviewed and approved by a range of Cambodian government agencies, including ...

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(July 06, 2010) Wildlife surveys in the newly extended core area of Seima Protection Forest started earlier this year and they have been yielding exciting results. One of the most interesting of these has been an unusual encounter with a large herd of one of SPF's most endangered species, Banteng.Banteng, one of Cambodia's three species of wild cattle, once occurred from southern China across mainland Southeast Asia, Peninsular Malaysia and parts of Indonesia. However, the species now persists only in greatly r...

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(February 25, 2010) The extraordinary history of the Kouprey (Bos sauveli), a species of wild cattle, has left it as one of the most enigmatic large mammals in Asia. There was surprise in the scientific community that such a large mammal should be described as late as 1937 from Cambodia, a relatively accessible country. Very little scientific information was available on this species until the mid 1950s when Charles Wharton organized an expedition to study and capture the species in Preah Vihear, northern Cambodia....

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(February 25, 2010) Community Management Committees (CMCs) are community groups that have been established to become the caretakers of Integrated Farming & Biodiversity Areas (BFCAs). Four committees have been formed, with six members in each committee, representing between one and three villages. The villages represented are villages that are considered main user villages of the BFCAs, with members elected from each of the villages in question.The CMCs have several responsibilities. The CMCs work closely with ...

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(January 06, 2010) A rapid field-based assessment of the the Sre Ambel river and surrounding areas was implemented in late 2008 by a collaborative team comprising members of Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC), the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Conservation International–Cambodia (CI), the Forestry Administration (FA) and the Ministry of Environment (MOE).The survey, which lasted approximately four weeks, primarily focused on the numerous river valleys punctuating the coast and on a select group of foc...

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(January 04, 2010) The Community-based Production Forestry (CPF) pilot project seeks to demonstrate that a community-based enterprise is a realistic model for future forest management in Cambodia. Its aim is to provide timber for the market, satisfy government stakeholders, and address community concerns at the same time. The CPF model addresses the crucial social issues of the emerging community forestry sector (such as decentralized/local decision-making, customary use and local tenure), yet also takes into acco...

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(January 04, 2010) Gibbon surveys have been conducted in Preah Vihear Protected Forest and its periphery from 2006 to 2009, with important populations discovered in the area. Pileated gibbons feed mostly on fruits and shoots, and unsurprisingly the majority were found in denser, evergreen and riverine forest. However, an important number were also found in drier deciduous forest. The density was estimated at 0.3 groups per km2. This is low compared to other sites, but may reflect the large proportion of dry forest...

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(January 04, 2010) WCS is working with the Cambodian Fisheries Administration (FiA) to develop a strategy for the sustainable harvesting of watersnakes in the Tonle Sap Lake. This comes after research indicated that the emergent snake 'fishery' occurring on Tonle Sap Lake resulted in an estimated 6.9 million snakes (mostly homalopsids) being removed annually, representing the world's largest exploitation of a single snake assemblage. Interviews with hunters suggest that snake catches could have declined by as much...

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