Landscape Monitoring
A lack of knowledge regarding the status of biodiversity is a major impediment to conservation and sustainable development in the Congo Basin. Increased capacity to undertake systematic monitoring is critical to ensuring that decision makers can have up-to-date knowledge of animal populations for management decisions.
WCS-Congo has launched several ecological monitoring initiatives to correct this shortfall. A landscape monitoring program in northern Congo launched in 2006 is collecting data on large mammals across 4 million hectares of forest (protected areas, forestry concessions, community use zones), producing standardized data that will facilitate comparisons between areas, across management strategies and over time. This will provide us with vital information on wildlife populations, and allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of our interventions.
A monitoring program has also been implemented in the south of the country in the Conkouati-Douli National Park, while other surveys are looking assessing potential for the creation of new protected areas in the Bateke Plateaux and the Ntokou-Pikounda area. The Lac Télé Community Reserve first implemented a systematic monitoring program in 2000. In addition to large mammal distribution and abundance and human activities, we are working on developing other landscape indicators such as fish stocks.