Sebangau Landscape

We established the Orangutan Tropical Peatland Project (OuTrop) in 1999, to study and to support the protection and restoration of the Sebangau National Park. Our base is the Natural Laboratory of Peat-swamp Forest (LAHG), a special zone within the Sebangau National Park where research has been carried out since 1993. The former logging camp has been converted into a permanent research station, and has become a Centre of Excellence for Research, Conservation and Education.

The 570,000 hectare Sebangau National Park in southern Central Kalimantan is one of Borneo’s most important areas of rainforest. This tropical peat-swamp forest is the largest unfragmented area of forest remaining in Borneo’s lowlands and supports globally-significant populations of endangered species, including the largest known population of the Bornean orangutan in lowland Borneo and the white-bearded gibbon. Its vast peat deposits cover an area of 6,000 km² and reach depths of 15m, making Sebangau National Park peat-swamp forest one of the largest terrestrial carbon stores in the world.

We work in partnership with the Balai Taman Nasional Sebangau (BTNS) and Centre for International Cooperation in Sustainable Management of Tropical Peatland (CIMTROP) at the University of Palangka Raya. We support community patrol and fire-fighting teams made up of young, committed people from the local village, who want to stop the exploitation of their forest heritage and protect it for future generations. Their fire-fighting strategy is a model for fighting peatland fires in the province, and we are expanding our support of community fire-fighting teams to other like-minded and dedicated groups in recognition of the huge role they play in protecting forest during the worst drought seasons.

Rehabilitation areas of the Sebangau National Park peat-swamp forest, home of thousands wild orangutans

Our research activities in the LAHG, a special zone within the Sebangau National Park are divided into four key areas:

In-depth studies of Sebangau’s primates, understanding their behaviour, ranging, diet, reproduction, social networks and responses to disturbance; and collecting a long-term record of their density and abundance. Many orangutan, gibbon and red langur individuals have been habituated to human presence and are followed during their daily activities with the results used to discover more about the behaviour of some of our closest relatives, contribute to the study of primate evolution and support conservation planning in a multiple-use landscape. Our orangutan density research is the longest continuous study of its kind with results mapping a logging-induced crash and subsequent recovery after protection. This aids conservation management planning for this critically endangered species.
Understanding Borneo’s elusive wild cats by capturing their movements, and that of their prey, using remote-sensored camera traps. The clouded leopard, marbled cat and flat-headed cat are magnificent and secretive beasts, and we are learning much about their behaviour and ecology through this study.
Biodiversity and ecological monitoring. We study many different aspects of peat-swamp forest ecology, from birds to butterflies, litterfall to fruiting patterns, and use these to describe seasonal changes in the environment, to assess responses to and recovery from logging and fire, and to develop ecological indicators of change and disturbance.
Studies of the impacts and effectiveness of habitat restoration activities, including the damming of illegal logging channels to restore natural hydrological conditions; and the reforestation of burnt and logged areas within and outside the forest.