Exciting updates from Salonga! The Chengeta team is collaborating with the Biomonitoring team to set up camera traps around various sectors in the park and we’re excited to share some of the footage.
Salonga National Park, located in the heart of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a place of incredible biodiversity.
Covering 33 500 km² of pristine Congolese rainforest (roughly, the size of Belgium) Salonga is a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the last intact tropical rainforests in the world. It is home to an exceptional array of species, from keystone forest elephants and leopards, to bonobos, giant pangolins, Congo peafowl, golden-bellied mangabey sand spectacular trees like Sapeli and Moabi hardwoods.
To protect such a rich ecosystem and make informed decisions, law enforcement needs data to understand where best to focus efforts and effectively deploy rangers.
Supporting rangers and the work they do therefore means building supportive systems around them, creating synergies between the different pillars of conservation.
For instance, the team in the Operations Room needs to able to work with systems like SMART, Earth Ranger and QGIS to understand landscape dynamics, while the bio-monitoring team relies on using data collection tools and being able analyse data efficiently. Part of a ranger’s job includes data collection too: rangers need to understand systems like SMART to collect data (signs of human activity, species observed…) while on patrol, and send the information to the Ops Room.
In turn, this supports law enforcement teams and improves patrol deployment, guided by a robust information system.
To achieve this, we identify areas for skill and operational strengthening, like camera-trap placement, data collection, data analysis, and ensuring the different teams are equipped with the right tools and understand how to use them.
This is one example of many reflecting how interdependent effective conservation work is. Law enforcement cannot be treated as a separate entity operating alone. All pillars of conservation – research, community engagement, wildlife protection, anti-poaching and law enforcement – are intertwined, embedded within broader systems, from field to institutional levels.
The work we do in Salonga, training rangers and supporting wildlife protection efforts, is in partnership with the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature, ICCN) and WWF DRC / WWF Africa.
Photos by © Salonga /UGPNS
