(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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