Replanting Rainforest in Sumatra, Indonesia

The first half of 2016 has been extremely warm in northern Sumatra, with almost no rain at all. Hence in April and May, our field teams mainly focused their efforts on maintenance of the six seedling nurseries and previously-planted trees in the restoration sites, attempting to reduce the effects of the drought. 

Thanks to this daily hard work, our restoration sites present a survival rate of 80%, ensuring the return of a wide range of biodiversity in this secondary forest.

Meanwhile, our teams also worked in close cooperation with the Gunung Leuser National Park authority and a community group responsible for encroaching around 200 hectares of forest inside the National Park. After long negotiations, the community group accepted to restore these 200 hectares with our technical support and under the control of the park authority and rangers. Forest will be back in a few years from now while this group will be provided with alternative livelihoods in order to reconcile nature conservation and human sustainable development.

In June, the rainy season started, a great relief for our nurseries managers who take care of more than 65,000 seedlings! And our teams resumed restoration activities. After preparing the planting sites, they restored 18 hectares with 13,100 saplings.

Beyond planting trees, we recognise that we need to monitor the impacts of ecosystem restoration for biodiversity. That’s why we installed 11 camera traps in and around the restored forests to monitor the species returning to the new forest. We are also engaged in bird monitoring and the first results are encouraging: 28 species have been spotted in a matter of days!

Last but not least, we would like to underline the wonderful work done by Jessie Panazzolo and Todd Iancar who have been carrying out orangutan and elephant surveys for the last 5 months - we can’t wait to see the results of your research!

Thank you for supporting this incredible project - with your help, we are regenerating rainforest habitat. Orangutans and the many other species they share the forest with are free to roam, and it's fantastic to see the restoration site becoming part of their habitat once again.

The team in Sumatra have just checked the camera traps in the forest restoration site - and discovered a great video of a large wild orangutan sauntering through - you can watch via the link at the bottom of this report.

This was taken within the restored forest, with the orangutan heading towards the primary forest. Although mostly arboreal, orangutans are occasionally seen on the ground - especially big males. 

We can also see that the young forest is being used by a lot of other species, including critically endangered Sumatran elephants, and some curious pig-tailed macaques, as can be seen from the photos!

In the first three months of this year, the restoration teams have nurtured almost 74,000 tree seedlings in the organic tree nurseries, and planted 34,500 - the rest will be planted in the coming weeks, bringing us a big step closer to our goal to plant 2 million trees by the end of the year.

Thank you for supporting this incredible project - with your help, we are regenerating once-barren land, and turning it back into valuable, safe wildlife habitat. Orangutans and the many other species they share the forest with need room to roam, and it's fantastic to see the restoration site becoming part of their habitat once again.

Links:

• Watch the video of wild orangutan at forest restoration site!
• Join in with our Ape-ril campaign: unleash your inner orangutan!