Tanzania Conservation Catch-up

Last month, our conservation team took a trip to Tanzania to meet with our in-country partners on some exciting projects. Here Oliver Beasley, Lecturer in Conservation Science, joined by Dr Caspian Johnson, Conservation and HE Manager, share an account of their visit. 

After our flight landed in Dar es Salaam, we embarked on a 12-hour bus journey to Iringa, our starting point for this trip. We spent the first part of our trip with our partners, the Southern Tanzania Elephant Program (STEP), who are working to combat poaching in Ruaha National Park and MBOMIPA Wildlife Management Area. This park is home to many megafauna species, including African elephants (Loxodonta africana), a common target for illegal hunting in this region. We then met up with Dr Tom Richardson from University of Bristol’s Flight Labs who was joining us to explore the use of implementing drone technology to combat illegal activities within the park. The three of us along with STEPS protection manager Godfrey Nyangaresi ventured into the WMA to assess the application of drones in conservation and of course check out some wildlife along the way. An especially memorable moment for me was arriving back to the ranger’s station just in time to see elephants crossing the Ruaha river against the backdrop of the setting sun. 

From there, we visited the Udzungwa Scarp Nature Forest Reserve, where we'd been receiving reports of crop foraging by Sanje mangabey (Cercocebus sanjei), which is where an animal moves from its natural foraging environment to take food from farmland. Collaborating with the Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre (UEMC), we conducted questionnaires with local farmers to assess the extent of crop foraging incidents. This information helps conservationists like us understand the potential for conflict between farming communities and wildlife and take measures to ensure both wildlife and community livelihoods are protected. We concluded our visit by checking in on our habituated mangabey troop in the Udzungwa Mountains National Park the only other geographical area where this species can be found, and the site of our 12-year monitoring program. More information can be found here.

The third stop on our trip was a visit to Kimboza Forest Reserve, a forest home to the turquoise dwarf gecko, Lygodactylus williamsi, a Critically Endangered species that Bristol Zoological Society has pledged to protect. We first visited key project partner, Dr Charles Kilawe, a professor of botany at the Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) in Morogoro, before embarking on the two hour drive south to the forest.

Kimboza is a spectacular place, a biodiversity hotspot rich in endemic life including the turquoise dwarf gecko, Magomberae chameleon, as well as a multitude of plant species. However, it faces increasing pressure from illegal hunting, wildfires, invasive species, and illegal logging.

Together with our partners, we hope to address these threats, by reduce the local communities' dependency on the forest and increase habitat availability for key species. This includes preventing fires, removing invasive species, and restoration through the planting of native seedlings. We spent the next few days touring the forest, visiting the plant nursery, fire break zones, and of course, stopping to see some geckos along the way.

The last stop on our trip was Kanga, a forest where the PAMS Foundation has been working diligently to restore a forest corridor in the Nguru Mountains. We toured their extensive plant nursery, where hundreds of thousands of seedlings from around 40 different species are grown annually. This provided a valuable opportunity to learn from their approach, which we hope to apply to our forestry efforts in Kimboza. Of course, we couldn't resist the chance to plant a tree ourselves!

Overall, the trip proved to be a very productive one for the Tanzania conservation team, and we returned to the UK filled with ideas, inspiration and plans for future work in Tanzania!