Giant ground pangolin (Smutsia gigantea)
Mohamed bin Zayed Species project number 232526282
Community Rangers Project: Enhancing Community Field Assistants' Capacity for Long-term Collaborative Conservation Management of Pangolins in Deng-Deng National Park, Cameroon.
This project phase will train 06 local field assistants in biomonitoring of pangolins using SMART survey tools; camera trapping, GPS, cyber-tracking, and data collection and recording on field data forms. They will also be educated on environmental and research ethics which is necessary to provide reliable and consistent research information. The local assistants will function effectively as citizen scientists in providing consistent information (Couvet et al., 2008; Eden, 1996), and biomonitoring data to support pangolin welfare in Deng-Deng. The transformed local field assistants will be certified as Community Rangers and coordinated under a legal entity that will be formed and called Foundation of Restoration and Ecological Conservation (FREECO); in order to collaborate with government owned Eco-guards who are limited in number. Their collaboration will sustain an efficient conservation and ecosystem free of human interference and activities through removal of trapping devices, destruction of hunters houses, recording of every human signs, document pangolin and other species signs their habitat use and evolution. In future more disengaged hunters will be recruited. This project will establish a standard community-based collaborative monitoring system based on feedback and rapid intervention response based on human activities, pangolin ecology, population status and other field reports.