Heightening protection for Java's mountain wildlife

Posted by Stu & Christian Devenish

It is more than three years since Nigel Collar and I first discussed the need for extensive surveys of birds and other key endemic taxa across a whole range of mountains in West and Central Java. All of these mountains, including ones such as Gede-Pangrango which are well-known to many birders, are understudied, some have not been visited by biologists for half a century. This is a knowledge gap that needed to be filled quickly – the mountains are packed with Javan endemics; forest loss on most mountains has been significant, especially on their lower slopes; and heavy trapping for the cagebird trade has brought about reportedly precipitous declines in species such as Javan Green Magpie and Rufous-fronted Laughingthrush. 

Above - montane forest on Gunung Slamet; Below - the bird market at Purwokerto, Central Java (Photos: Gabby Salazar www.gabbysalazar.com)

Our recent review of ‘the state’ of West Java’s mountains including analysis of forest cover change (Higginbottom et al. in press), funded by the Shearwater Foundation, highlighted a series of around 20 mountains/blocks, all needing biological and socio-economic surveys fast. Coupled with this was a need and a desire by Indonesia’s Environment Ministry to consider expanding their protected area network in upland Java to better protect the country’s key species.

Maps showing the locations of mountains we intend to survey, and forest cover and loss since 1990 (from Higginbottom et al. in press)

A finding of our ‘Shearwater’ work was that forest inside of protected areas has indeed fared better than that outside of formal protection. This brought the project to the attention of Rainforest Trust, an NGO/Not for Profit which aims, through increasingly imaginative means, to expand the world’s protected area coverage. Finally, after much huffing and puffing, we are there – a four year project coordinated by Burung Indonesia, the BirdLife partner in Indonesia, which aims to identify priority areas for conservation in the Javan uplands – ones which have important populations of key species and habitats and the conditions under which these can be protected into the future – and to take one or more of these areas right through to designation as official protected areas.

Project preparations in the Burung office in Bogor with L>R Rick Stanley, Christian Devenish, Ria Saryanthi, Ridha Junaid & Stuart Marsden (Photo: Gabby Salazar www.gabbysalazar.com).

One of the first steps in this pipeline to protection is to conduct socio-economic studies in and around the candidate mountains, and to survey as well as we can the wildlife they contain. With up to 20 mountains to cover, this is no mean feat. We need to find out how local communities use the forest and perceive its value and how this might change under protection. We also want to know about patterns of bird trapping and which areas might serve as sanctuaries or release sites for threatened birds in the future. Not least we need to know which species from a range of taxonomic groups survive on which mountains, where they occur and in what kind of numbers in which habitats. We certainly cannot survey everything everywhere – so the choice of taxa, locations and methods have taken a great deal of thought. 

Capacity building in action. Above - Ridha (far right) joined our bird surveying workshop in Bogor as a student a couple of years ago. Below - Ridha talking birds with local students as a researcher on the Rainforest Trust project.

Finally, we have plumped for a system of week-long surveys at multiple sites within mountains. We have also decided on a fusion of controlled and relatively high tech surveys using remote cameras and acoustic recorders arranged along transects, and more extensive ‘quick and dirty’ encounter rate searches for key species. Records from the latter may feed into spatial distributional analyses (such as ENFAs) which will help to identify hotspots for protection at the local level. Key groups we are focusing on are birds of course, ground-dwelling mammals and primates such as Javan Gibbon, and selected amphibians.
 

Above - The fieldwork is quite tech-heavy compared to our usual projects. Below - We will be surveying remotely and actively birds, mammals and amphibians (Photos: Gabby Salazar www.gabbysalazar.com)

Our first survey has just started on Gunung Slamet in Central Java, the most easterly of our mountains and one that has special significance on account of its large size and relatively isolated position. With additional funding from our friends at Chester Zoo, we have around six weeks on various parts of the mountain. We have a team of 8-10  in the field comprising Ridha Junaid and a researcher from Burung Indonesia, Rick Stanley and Gabby Salazar, experienced PhD students/wildlife recorders from USA, two students from the local university (capacity building is a key component of the project), and Pak Karso and his excellent team of local guides. Periodically, they will be joined by Bas van Balen, Christian, myself and a whole series of other people over the next 18 months as they move from mountain to mountain.