They have now planted 17,300 seedlings of ten different types of rhino food plants (including jackfruit, ficus, alstonia and agarwood) across 70 acres. We’ve hired 25 people from local communities to plant and maintain this site, monitor the site for illegal activities and remove snares. With additional technical and financial assistance from Taronga Conservation Society Australia, our teams also built better fire breaks and invested in additional fire-fighting equipment. We planted larger seedlings, which should be better able to resist fire damage, and cleared larger spaces around each seedling. IRF, YABI and the park remained committed to supporting this critical program to restore Sumatran rhino habitat, and started working immediately to replant the site, with extra fire prevention measures in place.

Because rainforest species grow quickly, the replanted forest should be mature enough for rhinos within just four or five years – and our experience elsewhere has shown us that rhinos are experts at quickly finding and taking advantage of new habitats.ĭue to a prolonged dry season and high winds, the November 2019 fire only took about an hour to move through the Rawa Bunder site.

In late 2018, Way Kambas National Park, IRF and Yayasan Badak Indonesia (YABI), a local foundation, began a pilot project to restore degraded habitat and reforest it with rhino and elephant food plants. Sadly, around one-third of the rhinos’ rainforest habitat has already been lost to deforestation. Way Kambas is also the only protected area in Indonesia with no buffer zone – villages surround the park on all sides, and human settlements have frequently encroached into the park, destroying the habitat that rhinos and other wildlife need to survive.

Experts estimate that Way Kambas National Park on the island of Sumatra holds one of only two wild populations in the world large enough to reproduce and sustain itself. The Sumatran rhino, a Critically Endangered species with fewer than 80 individuals, can only be found in tiny rainforest pockets on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan. Sumatran rhinos are classified as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Species Survival Commission.

Trees in rhino