• Lopé Nat'l Park
• Waka NP
• Birougou NP
• Ivindo NP
• Cristal Mts NP
• Mayumba NP
• Loango NP
• Bateke Plateau NP
• Akanda NP
• Pongara NP
• Capacity building for Gabon Nat'l Parks Office
• Park delimitation
• Biological and socio-economic monitoring
• Training of conservation professionals
• Bushmeat issues
• Reduced impact logging
• Wildlife health
• Reduced impact logging
• Leopard ecology
• People and Parks
• Humpback whale ecology
• Mandrill ecology
• Elephant ecology
• Ape ecology, health and genetics
• Archaeology in the national parks
• Vegetation history and dynamics in Lopé
• Gabon
National Parks Council
• Ministry of Water and
Forests
• Ministry of Tourism
• CENAREST
• CIRMF
• ENEF
• CIFOR/IRET
• WWF
• Conservation
Internat'l
• Smithsonian Institute
• MO Botanical Garden
• USAID/CARPE
• US Forest Service
• ASF
• John Aspinall Fndation
• FORM / TFF
• Darwin Initiative
• MacArthur
Foundation
Name : Dr. Lee White,
Title : Country Program Director,
Email :
lwhite[AT SIGN]uuplus[DOT]com
Address :
Wildlife Conservation Society,
BP 7847,
Libreville,
Gabon.
For more information, see www.wcs.org/africa
Wildlife Conservation Society International
Conservation,
Africa Program,
2300 Southern Blvd.,
Bronx, NY 10460, USA
The Wildlife Conservation Society's International Conservation program saves wildlife and wild lands by understanding and resolving critical problems that threaten key species and large, wild ecosystems around the world.
• Site-based conservation
• Research
• Training and capacity-building
• New model development
• Informing policy
• Linking zoo-based and field-based conservation
Contributions to this project can be sent to the WCS Africa Program in NY (address above)
Langoue Bai
WCS first started working in Gabon in 1985, when Dr. Richard Barnes initiated a 4-year nationwide elephant survey that discovered that there were about 60,000 elephants hidden in Gabon's rain forests. This survey was followed by work on natural resource use by rural populations in the Minkébé region in the northeast and by Lee White's study on the ecological impacts of commercial logging in the Lopé Reserve. In 1992 WCS established a country program under Lee White's direction, based out of the 'gorilla and chimpanzee research station in Lopé'. In 1997, at the invitation of WWF, WCS ran a training program in survey methods at Sette Cama in the Gamba protected area complex, and subsequently designed and implemented a two-year large mammal survey over the 10,000km2 protected area. In 1999 the Ministry of Water and Forests asked WCS scientist Lee White to design and undertake a nationwide survey of priority sites for biodiversity conservation, co-financed by WWF. These surveys provided a uniquely comprehensive understanding of the ecological and socio-political context for conservation in Gabon. Based on these evaluations, complemented by the results of the 'mega-transect', WCS scientists Lee White and Mike Fay were instrumental in convincing President Bongo to establish a national park system in 2002 that set aside just over 10% of the national patrimony for conservation within 13 National Parks. Since 2003, with funding from the Moore Foundation and USAID, WCS has been assisting the Gabon National Parks Office to manage a number of these protected areas and to plan strategically for eco-tourism development in the country.
For the past five years, WCS has been collaborating with the Darwin Initiative on a Gabon-wide survey of the bushmeat trade, in an effort to better understand the socio-economic dimensions of this traffic and its potential impact on wildlife (See bushmeat factsheet). Bushmeat is an important source of protein for villagers, as meat from domesticated animals is prohibitively expensive. This contrasts with the towns and cities of Gabon, where bushmeat is a luxury that only the well off can afford for special occasions.
Though it is not possible or even desirable to completely stop hunting by villagers for their own consumption, the commercial hunting done by outsiders must be better controlled. WCS and the Darwin Initiative are currently working with communities to allow them greater control over the wildlife resources in their traditional territories.
More recently, following the creation of Gabon's thirteen National Parks, WCS has teamed up with the MacArthur Foundation and Boston College to evaluate the socio-economic impacts of these Parks on the livelihoods of nearby villages. Understanding whether and how protected areas influence the welfare of households that reside close to Parks is a critical first step in developing and implementing policies to address any adverse effects of Parks on people, or identifying policy options that increase local benefits associated with Parks.
Gorilla