Restoring Elephant Forest Habitat in Salakpra Conservation Area, West Thailand

This project created an original knowledge-base to restore bamboo-deciduous forest in Western Thailand, particularly to create habitat for elephant conservation and to reduce human-elephant conflicts around the Salakpra Conservation Area, Kanchanaburi Province. The project was funded by the Keidanren Nature Conservation Fund with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and was implemented by the Elephant Conservation Network (ECN), with FORRU-CMU assisting with technical matters.

The objectives were:

• to develop local capacity to implement forest restoration activities;
• to determine tree species composition of the main forest formations in Salakpra;
• to determine optimal seed collection times/treatments to hasten seed germination & seedling growth;
• to develop and manage a community-based forest tree nursery and planting sites and
• to present initial results to stakeholders to empower them to implement forest restoration.

Activities and outputs

The ECN project team and stakeholders training in nursery techniques at FORRU-CMU 2009FORRU-CMU's inputs consisted mostly of training ECN staff on restoration theory and practices; training local people in nursery techniques so they could grow saplings of the required tree species and assisting with monitoring trial plots and analyzing the data, culminating in a technical manual (in Thai) on how to restore the bamboo-deciduous forest that dominated lowland areas of Salakpra—bamboo being the main food of the several hundred wild elephants that inhabited the protected area.

The final project activity, in September 2011, was an information-sharing workshop, with local foresters, community leaders, villagers and NGO representatives, at which the results of nursery experiments and field trials were presented, along with the resultant best practices detailed in the manual.