GC Progress Report: Thap Lan World Heritage, Thailand

Thap Lan World Heritage

Park and Wildlife Protection - Progress January - May, 2018

Background

Reporting contributed by WCS Thailand Team with Thap Lan Park Leadership

Since 2016, Global Conservation has given a significant support to help strengthening law enforcement in Thap Lan National Park as the key tiger recovery site for Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai World Heritage Site.  Such support has boosted the performance and resulted in key successes as the following:

1. Significant increase in patrol efforts in terms of frequency and coverage by park rangers with high morale and solid support.

2. Increase of law enforcement cases on rosewood poaching and arrests until the numbers of incidents started to decline in the high poaching zone in the southwest of the park.

3. The SMART patrol system and the Trailcams, locally known as the Network Centric Anti-poaching System or NCAP) have become a model for the government to increase the financial support for DP-KY complex.

4. UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee’s decision in the meeting in Poland in 2017 has seized to down-list the site as World Heritage in Danger based mainly on the key improvements in the protection to the Outstanding Universal Values of the site.

The second phase of the support from GC started in July 1, 2017. This brief report prepared by WCS Thailand and Department of Parks and Wildlife Thailand covers January to April 2018.   

February 7 2018, a wood transporter arrested and rosewood planks confiscated following the GPS tracker.

In 2017 – 2018 there were 3 main objectives:

1. Training of 40 park rangers in Thap Lan National Park to increase capacity in order to reduce poaching incidents in Thap Lan by mid-2018 (This objective is to be conducted in February 2018.

2. Maintaining the patrol coverage and frequency in the areas with high wildlife and rosewood poaching incidents that have been increased since mid-2017.

3. Increasing the use of threat monitoring technology (i.e., NCAP, GPS trackers) and to increase the efficiency of the existing SMART patrol teams in not only in Thap Lan but also in Pang Srida, and Khao Yai National Parks by mid-2018.

Progress

Objective 1: Training of 40 park rangers in Thap Lan National Park to increase capacity in order to reduce poaching incidents in Thap Lan by mid-2018.

In the last brief report we mentioned that we would conduct the park ranger training around June 2018.  Unfortunately in June WCS trainers are extremely occupied with park and wildlife students in the Western Forest Complex.  Also the trainers from the Police Department are not available.  Therefore, we have already set the schedule for training park rangers in Thap Lan in August 2018.

Objective 2: Maintaining the patrol coverage and frequency in the areas with high wildlife and rosewood poaching incidents that has been increased since mid-2017.

There are important developments in Thap Lan NP as following.

New rangers hired and five more patrol teams added

Since January 2018, Thap Lan NP has hired new park rangers.  This has resulted in the total number of patrol teams has increase from 9 teams in 2017 to 14 teams in 2018.  This has helped intensify law enforcement actions.

Patrol Effort

Park rangers in Thap Lan have spent about 4 days per patrol trip.  They have spent about an average of 500 km/month on foot patrol 850 km/month on vehicle patrol.  The foot patrol distance is less than last year because park rangers have deployed more cellular camera traps (NCAPs) along the boundary of the parks to intercept poachers coming in and out.  Therefore most of the arrested cases in 2018 have happened near the boundary where vehicle accessibility is possible.

Patrol Coverage

The park rangers have covered about 50% of the park area on patrol.  They also focused the patrol frequency more than 10 times in the area around the northern border of the park where the recent rosewood poaching activities have occurred.

Patrol coverage and frequencies during January to April 2018 in Thap Lan National Park (Subset 5A: Foot patrol. 5B: Vehicle patrol).

Poaching threat significantly declined

In January the number of poachers arrested were large, 16 Thai and 92 foreigners.  The records have sharply dropped from February to April, 12 Thai and 29 foreigners.  It has remained to be seen that whether it big drop of poaching cases is as the result of the intensified law enforcement activities.  They have also driven 142 poachers out of the park, seized 13 guns, and destroyed 8 snares. The number of logging cases also showed the decline pattern.

Illegal land clearing and illegal settlements continue to plague the entire UNESCO World Heritage Park, despite satellite and aerial monitoring.

Rosewood and wildlife poaching – at project starts 1,000s of illegal intruders in the park. No tourists are allowed, so every group is illegal. Photo: Freeland/DNP.
 

Overview schematic of Global Park Defense.

Suwanna Guantlett of Wildlife Alliance (Cambodia) getting first round of Cellular Trailcams after seeing progress at Thap Lan National Park. Replication of Global Park Defense across Asia's endangered national parks is a primary goal for 2018-2025.

Recent photos of new tiger population of 12-16 in Thap Lan (c) Freeland/DNP/Panthera.