Features

Udzungwa Forest Project:
A New Flamingo Land Project in Tanzania

Flamingo Land’s Udzungwa Forest Project (UFP) is an integrated conservation, research and education project based in Tanzania. The project is aiming to break new ground for zoo-funded conservation by bridging the typically large gap between research and conservation. The project has a holistic approach, working not only to conserve and research threatened species, but also their habitats. Most importantly the project will also aim to train local people, improve livelihoods, and advertise the biodiversity, importance and beauty of the Udzungwa Mountains.

The major work of UFP is to facilitate conservation planning in an important forest just to the east of the main Udzungwa block. Magombera Forest lies about 6km from the main Udzungwa range and like all forests has importance for environmental services to local communities, such as water, medicinal products and firewood. The remaining forest is also very important biologically, for example over 40% of the trees are either IUCN red-listed or known only from the forests of East Africa. The forest has the highest density of the endemic red-listed Udzungwa red colobus monkey (Procolobus gordonorum) anywhere. Magombera is also an important dry season refuge for elephants of the Selous Game Reserve and one of two known localities of the newly described Magombera chameleon (Kinyongia sp nov), discovered by a team of scientists including Flamingo Land’s Director of Conservation Science, Dr. Andy Marshall.

Lowland tropical forest such as that found in Magombera, is one of the world’s most threatened habitats. Until the late half of this century the area where Magombera is found contained extensive forest, which has now been cleared for agriculture. Destruction of forest required felling of thousands of trees and shooting several hundred elephants. The remaining forest is only around 10 km2 (about one quarter of its size in the 1970s) and is the last remaining forest in the northern end of a huge valley (Kilombero). The current level of administrative protection is inadequate and uncertain, and like most forests in Tanzania, there is currently no active protection.

Before initiating UFP, Dr. Marshall co-ordinated a monitoring programme in Magombera through a grant to the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s Tanzania Programme Office. Following completion of this, UFP is now working with the local villages, schools, management authorities, NGOs and land-owners to help manage the area in several ways. In the forest the project has been surveying illegal forest use, animals and forest growth. The results of monitoring will be used as an indicator of management success, and a tool for local education. While monitoring is vital to ensure successful conservation of habitats, only a very low proportion of protected areas in Africa have long-term monitoring programmes.

The project is also conducting research projects on habitat restoration, colobus monkey diet, estimating animal populations and natural resource use by local villages. At the recent BIAZA Mammal Working Group meeting, zoos from across the UK and Ireland voted to award a £1,000 Conservation Grant to Flamingo Land to initiate our primary area of research for this year. The money will be used to hire and train a Tanzanian graduate to assist us with surveys of the habitat of the critically endangered kipunji monkey (Rungwecebus kipunji). The kipunji monkey was only discovered new to science in 2004 and is one of the world’s rarest primates. Its population is little more than a thousand individuals and its range less than 25 km2, less than one tenth the size of the city of York! Our focus will be on the most threatened of the two known populations, which consists of only 93 individuals in 9km2. The reason for its restricted range is a mystery.