1993-1996: The beginning

OuTrop was formally established in 1999, but we trace our roots back to the early 1990's and a collaborative research project developed by Professor Jack Rieley of the University of Nottingham, Dr Susan Page of the Unviersity of Leicester and Suwido Limin of the University of Palangkaraya. They began study of the ecology of the tropical peat swamp forest ecosystem in 1993, using a team of undergraduate student volunteers from Nottingham and Palangkaraya universities to set-up and measure forest plots, collect peat-core samples, take water-table readings and all the other information necessary to begin understanding this unique, dual peatland and tropical forest ecosystem. This was all achieved during six-week long summer expeditions, but the basis for a long-term research program was laid down, by building the first researcher huts at the Setia Alam Camp and developing formal links with the Indonesian government and University of Palangkaraya.

Of course the high biological diversity of the Sabangau was noticed as well, and Nottingham students began undertaking separate studies of the birds, mammals and fish in the forest. In 1995 two of these students, Simon Husson and Helen Morrogh-Bernard, joined the expedition with the idea of exploring bird and mammal diversity, as well as helping out with the long-term habitat work - but one month before they left they were given a copy of a recently published research paper describing how orangutans could be surveyed by counting their nests (sleeping platforms.) With a lot of help from Indonesian researchers and students, Simon and Helen learnt what a nest looked like and carried out the first density surveys in the habitat. They returned in 1996 and did the surveys in more depth by covering a wider area, and prepared reports on the results including a scientific paper pubished in Biological Conservation in 2003. These early results suggested (and have since been confirmed) that a very large population of orangutans lived here - perhaps more than 10,000 individuals - and thus of considerable importance for the conservation of this species. To illustrate this, at the same time as our surveys in 1995, a workshop on orangutan conservation was held which estimated that there were only 15,000 individuals remaining in the world, but the Sabangau was not mentioned.

A major peatland conference was held in Palangkaraya in 1995, attracting participants from all over the world and Sir David Bellamy as keynote speaker, and the importance of tropical peatlands and peat swamp forest became well and truly established. In 1997 Jack Rieley and Suwido Limin established CIMTROP, the Center for International Cooperation in Tropical Peatland, as a regionally-based centre for peatland scientists and conservationists to integrate their activities, and in 1998 the Indonesian government declared 50,000 hectares of peat swamp forest in the north of the Sabangau catchment as a research area, called the Natural Laboratory for the Study of Peat Swamp Forest, to be managed by CIMTROP. The Setia Alam Jaya logging company moved out and their basecamp, and the now legendary railway, became CIMTROP's. Whilst this progress was being made, however, Indonesia became politically and economically unstable, and the last Nottingham-Leicester expedition took place in September 1996.

1997-2000: Turmoil and Renewal

The years of 1997 and 1998 were a time of turmoil in Indonesia. A huge financial crash crippled the economies of south-east asian nations, causing many banks and financial institutions to collapse, sending inflation and exchange rates soaring and sending many millions of people into hardship and poverty. Indonesia was hit hard and many people took to the streets in protest at the government's handling of the crisis, widescale corruption, undemocratic elections and human rights abuses. After several violent clashes between the army and protestors, then-President Soeharto resigned his 30-year rule and paved the way for the first fully democratic elections in Indonesia in 1999.

Before Soeharto resigned, however, he instigated the Mega-Rice Project, an ambitious plan to convert 2 million hectares of Kalimantan peatland into rice padi, to be farmed by migrant workers from Java and to make Indonesia self-sustainable in rice production. But the project was a terrible failure, as warned by CIMTROP and other scientists - peatland was completely unsuitable for growing rice - but these warnings were ignored. Huge canals were built in the peat, ostensibly to control water-levels but instead completely draining the once-flooded swamps. A major drought in 1997 saw hardly any rain falling between July and February, and the peat dried out completely, caught fire and burnt for months, resulting in a huge smoke haze that covered much of south-east Asia and released huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The area continues to burn annually during the dry season. The Mega-Rice Project is one of the world's biggest environmental disasters. Thankfully the Project was stopped before the Sabangau Forest was drained and cleared.

With the resignation of Soeharto, a wave of lawlessness spread throughout the country and corruption became widespread at all levels. Illegal logging became rampant in all forested areas, including the Sabangau, in which hundreds of small canals were dug in order to extract felled timber. Whereas the logging concession only removed the largest trees from a handful of selected species, illegal loggers cut many more kinds of tree and took even the smallest individuals of the most valuble species. This was the situation facing us when we returned to the Setia Alam in 1999 to resume our studies, and to see how illegal logging had affected orangutan density and distribution. Base camp had been renewed with the building of several dedicated huts for visiting researchers, but the place was very different to 1996. The logging camp, which was home to over 100 loggers and their families, was deserted apart from CIMTROP's camp manager and the logger's huts had been pulled down. The logging railway, which earlier had given us easy access to 25km into the forest, had been pulled up and instead we were faced with a long hike on foot. Quite how long we didn't realise until we decided to try and reach the tall interior forest, 13km inland, to see how the orangutan population was faring up there. Loaded up with a week's supply of food, camping and cooking equipment, six of us headed off up the old railway route - and took three and a half days to reach our destination!

Fortunately the International Foundation for Animal Welfare (IFAW) came up with some funding to clear the route and lay down a basic walkway, and this journey has never been as demanding again - although it is still not for the faint-hearted! Our research in 1999 and 2000 demonstrated that the orangutan population had made major shifts in distribution as a response to the logging - understandably they move away from areas where trees are being cut down - but hadn't appeared to have suffered any loss in numbers. We also visited another ten locations in the Sabangau Forest to see if orangutans were distributed throughout the forest, and found our red-haired cousins everywhere we went. The Sabangau was truly important for the survival of the orangutan.

2001-2003: Raising the Profile and our first Volunteers

2001 started with the major Orangutan Protection Workshop held in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan (link to Report). We presented our results here and met many of our colleagues working in orangutan and habitat conservation for the first time. This conference was the first of several to tackle the issues surrounding protection of orangutan habitat, and was a major milestone towards their long-term conservation. 2001 was also an important year for OuTrop, as we brought student volunteers to Setia Alam for the first time. We didn't know what to expect, but it was more successful than we could have hoped. Our students worked hard and collected huge amounts of valuable data. So much of what we are trying to find out is time-limited - we are looking at changes in habitat condition, biodiversity and ape populations over time - and if we can't collect the data in one year we can never get it again. So having a large team of researchers is crucial to our success.

Illegal logging was still widespread, and most days we worked to the sound of chainsaws in the distance. We saw little wildife in those days, barely half the volunteers actually seeing an orangutan - a far cry from today when we spend days following and studying them. This could have become depressing, but we knew that if we obtained positive results on the diversity of the forest, and presented these to government officials and conservation groups, we could raise the Sabangau's profile thereby ensuring that the area was not forgotten and that protection and law enforcement operations would come. Another major Orangutan Protection Workshop was held in 2002, this time in our hometown of Palangkaraya. This was an excellent opportunity for us to showcase our work to the wider world and we arranged a field trip to Setia Alam for the workshop participants.

In 2002 we supported the establishment of two education projects - Lembaga Pendidikan Lingkungan Hidup Kalimantan Tengah (the Central Kalimantan Environmental Education Foundation) who introduced environmental education modules into the local school curriculum; and the CIMTROP-OuTrop education program which, led by Angela Benton-Browne, carried out fun, interactive education lessons for children in our local village of Kereng Bangkerai, and stakeholder-led awareness workshops for the rest of the community. Angela ran this project until 2004 when it was passed over to the management of CIMTROP, and we helped set up Yayasan Cakrawala Indonesia, an education and community support foundation managed by Denny Kurniawan that seeks to help communities on the far side of the Sabangau Forest develop environmentally and economically-sustainable livelihoods. We continue to support them today.

In 2002 we met with and discussed the importance of the area with WWF Netherlands, who were looking for a site at which to start an orangutan conservation program. On the basis of our representations they chose the Sabangau, and introduced funding and staff for WWF Indonesia to begin a project.

2003-2007: Year-round Research and Forest Protection

As well as contributing to our research objectives, the volunteer program raised much needed funds for the project infrastructure. In 2001 we replaced the old kitchen with a bigger, better kitchen and dining room; in 2003 built a large staff building and office and a meeting area in the centre of camp and in 2005 built a scientific laboratory and seedling nursery. We also have to repair the railway annually as this is under water for four months of the year and becomes damaged during this time. We built a planked walkway two kilometres into the forest and cut a grid system of transects 3km by 3km in the mixed swamp forest behind camp. This infrastructure enabled us to start year-round research into orangutan behaviour, monitoring of nest densities and forest productivity studies. Grants from the US Fish and Wildlife Service Great Ape Conservation Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Primate Conservation Incorporated and the LSB Leakey Foundation enabled us to emply and equip full-time staff, and in September 2003 began searching for and habituating individual orangutans in the forest.

We had continued monitoring orangutan densities during this time, which revealed a startling finding in 2002. Before then the overall density of the forest had remained stable from year-to-year, even though there were major shifts in distribution between the different habitat sub-types. But in 2002 our density estimates were markedly down - to a level only two thirds that of 2001. We came to realise that many orangutans had moved into the poor-quality low pole forest to escape illegal logging in the mixed-swamp and tall-interior forest types. This habitat couldn't support such high densities of orangutan over the long-term, and we predict that a poor fruit year sent many, already starving, orangutans to their death. Overall we think that one third of the orangutans in the Sabangau Forest died during 2001-2002. The numbers haven't decreased further since, in fact they started to show signs of recovery in 2006. But this was a stark warning that uncontrolled logging could have major impacts on orangutan populations, and that the evidence of that may take many years to become apparent.

With that knowledge, we wanted to find out how the rest of the population, those that had survived, were coping in the logged environment. Were they healthy and behaving and breeding normally, or were they undernourished and in further danger? Nest surveys are an excellent tool to estimate the population of orangutans in an unknown forest, but are limited in their ability to spot short-term changes in population size and don't tell us anything about a population's health. So we started finding and following individual orangutans. The first thing we did was habituate them to human presence - on the first day they were found they would make aggressive kiss-squeak vocalisations, throw things at us and try and escape through the trees, but dedicated researchers keeping their distance and trying not to scare them eventually succeeded in convincing the orangutans we were no threat to them! 27 different individuals were habituated in the first two years and we have got to know these individuals well. Some of them are now so comfortable to be around us that they come into the trees at the edge of camp from time-to-time and appear to be studying us! This had't happened since 1995 and is evidence of the excellent habitat protection work being carried out by CIMTROP.

As mentioned above, whilst we were carrying out research in our early years, illegal loggers were cutting the trees at the same time. This mustn't be confused with clear-fell logging - much of the forest structure remains after logging - but large parts of the canopy are destroyed, lianas cut and small trees used to build 'skids', rails to slide the timber along to the canal or river for final removal from the forest. If this wasn't stopped the forest would have been very heavily damaged. But in 2003 CIMTROP established a Patrol Team - a small team of dedicated young people from the local village who realised that the forest surrounding their village was important to their welfare, such as providing clean air and water, prevent floods, nourish fish-stocks and provide many important economic resources such as natural rubber and rattan. The Patrol Team, supported by the police, entered the forest and stopped the illegal cutting of timber. At the same time they encouraged the development of fish-farming and sustainable agriculture in and around Kereng Bangkerai, as a replacement economic activity to logging. The Patrol Team has had tremendous success and we have supported and worked in partnership with them for all this time, and continue to source and provide funding for them to continue this excellent work. They have shown us that a small team of committed local people can have tremendous success in solving local problems - they managed to stop illegal logging in the north-eastern Sabangau Forest two years before it was stopped anywhere else in the Sabangau.

Today the forest is recovering well from logging, and several of the logging bosses are now in jail or facing trial for their illegal actions during this time. There are still a few problems, such as the unregulated hunting of fruit bats, but the Patrol Team are working to find sustainable solutions to these. The rest of the Sabangau Forest outside of the Natural Laboratory was proposed as a National Park in 2004 as a result of WWF's work, and illegal logging here was finally stopped in 2006 by a coordinated effort of the police and army. We expanded our research activities to include detailed forest regeneration studies, looking at successional stages following selective logging, forest clearance or fire; studies of gibbon behaviour and ecology and studies of bird and butterfly diversity and abundance in areas of differing logging damage. Meanwhile we continue to study orangutan density and work on many aspects of orangutan conservation. In 2004 we made major contributions to the Orangutan Population and Habitat Viability Analysis, carrying out surveys in many unknown forests in Central and West Kalimantan; standardising results and co-authoring the final report. We have provided advice and training to many researchers and organisations working in Borneo, and collaborate with several other projects on a number of scientific studies of orangutan and rainforest.

The Present

Our volunteer program is now firmly established and makes an important contribution to the protection of the Natural Laboratory and the wider Sabangau Forest. We provide an economic alternative to logging by employing staff, buying supplies and chartering boat transport from the local village. The program raises funds to support the Patrol Team, fight fires and carry out education and sustainable development projects. We provide our staff with training and education opportunities, sponsor local events and build CIMTROP's scientific and management capacity, for example by funding the development of their herbarium and improving facilities at camp to benefit a host of visiting researchers.

Our research program continues to go from strength-to-strength. The orangutan behaviour project has now collected 10,000 hours of focal-animal observations, making it one of the largest studies of its kind, and the results are not only useful for conservation purposes but are revealing many interesting discoveries on the behaviour, ecology, social structure and development of one of mankind's closest relatives. The gibbon behaviour project is remarkably successful and is collecting a wealth of new and interesting observations on a largely unknown species. We have identified the Sabangau as critically important for many different species of plant and animal. The orangutan density monitoring project is the biggest, longitudinal study of changes and trends in orangutan density and we are making major advancements to the nest-survey method allowing us to estimate orangutan density more accurately than ever before. Between 2001 and 2007, 145 young scientists and students from eleven different countries have joined the volunteer program, and during this time research for 22 BSc dissertations and 13 Masters theses has been carried out on subjects as diverse as orangutan intestinal parasite loads and differences in gibbon great calls to studies of oil palm plantation expansion in Kalimantan and the use of natural forest products in the local economy.

The main focus of our research has always been to provide scientific data to support conservation. Our first objective was to describe the importance of the Sabangau and raise the region's profile - this has been very successful, with the Sabangau listed as one of the high-priority sites for orangutan conservation, and designated as a proposed National Park. Second, we wanted to see how illegal activities had affected the forest and its biodiversity, and whether the orangutan population was in good health. This also achieved, our aim now is to continually monitor the status of biodiversity in the forest: to identify problem areas, assess trends, provide feedback to the forest management agencies and to prove the success or otherwise of habitat management and protection activities. An integrated ecological monitoring and feedback system is repeatedly identified as crucial to the success of any protected-area anywhere in the world. We are now implementing a system of monitoring and feedback in the Sabangau Forest. During 2007 and 2008 we are setting up eight monitoring sites at which we are collecting baseline data on orangutan and gibbon density, and forest structure, diversity and integrity. These sites will then be visited and surveyed annually, allowing volunteers to spend many memorable days camping in the heart of the Sabangau jungle!

We continue to support committed organisations and individuals that develop local solutions for local problems. CIMTROP, their Patrol Team and YCI continue to prove that they can develop successful and cost-effective programs to tackle problems of habitat protection, poverty and sustainable development. We support them both through fund-raising and advice, and by providing high-quality scientific data to prove the success of their activities and highlight regions of need. We are working together to dam the illegal logging canals that drain the peat and endanger the stability of the peatland system.