Ecological Monitoring
In collaboration with the WCS-Living Landscapes Program, a landscape monitoring program has been developed across a continuous forest zone of northern Congo encompassing the Lac Tele Community Reserve, the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, and the logging concessions adjacent to Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. The total study area covers over 2.8 million hectares of forest, constituting some of the most important conservation regions in Central Africa for elephants and other large mammals.
The monitoring program represents the first attempt to implement a standardized and integrated monitoring program on a landscape scale. The sampling design will facilitate comparisons between areas and through time, which will be particularly important to evaluate management interventions used to combat elephant poaching and the potential spread of Ebola.
The surveys will be conducted every two years across all sites, and will be coordinated between landscape projects and between project research staff so that multiple field teams will be working simultaneously throughout a four-five month period of the dry season (January - May). The monitoring program builds upon a substantial database of baseline data on wildlife populations across the landscape, collected between 2000-2005 through a number of highly collaborative survey programs involving WCS and the CITES-MIKE project, as well as CIB, FFEM and the USFWS.