TEMPO.CO, Lampung - There are many trees in Way Kanan Forest at the Way Kambas National Park in Lampung, yet the Rhino Protection Unit has a specific rule about which trees camera traps can be placed on.
On a Saturday afternoon in September this year, the team installed these hidden cameras on trees that face the trail where the rhinos pass.
WWF-Indonesia species specialist, Sunarto, said the camera traps are just one of the three methods used to study the rhino population. The other two methods include calculating rhino occupancy and an analysis of the DNA from rhino fecal samples (fecal-DNA). These methods were agreed on following a workshop that included a number of non-profit organizations and national park institutes from September 26 to 29 this year in Way Kambas.
The workshop was aimed at following up a recommendation made by the Sumatran Rhino Crisis Summit held in Singapore last April. During the international summit, world rhinoceros experts questioned the latest condition of the Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis), which is currently in danger of extinction. These past couple of decades, the population of the Sumatran rhino remained between only 100 and 200 rhinos.
The relatively stagnant number of Sumatran rhinos resulted in two questions being raised among scientists: has the rhino habitat reached its carrying capacity? Or is the survey method for measuring the rhino population no longer relevant?
Rhino observer from the Leuser Consevation Forum, Rudi Putra, said the habitat of the Sumatran rhino is actually quite vast. The smallest rhino compared to all five rhino species in the world is spread throughout the forests of Way Kambas, Bukit Barisan Selatan, Leuser, Kalimantan, the Malaysian Peninsula and Serawak in Malaysia.
These past two months, researchers have spotted the rhinos in two locations in Sumatra. Aside from the Sumatran forests, these small rhinos were also seen in the forests of West Kutai, East Kalimantan. A joint monitoring team from WWF-Indonesia and the West Kutai administration obtained physical evidence of the existence of these rhinos through a video trap in June and August this year.
The visual evidence of the existence of these rhinos in Way Kambas and West Kutai reinforced theopinions of conservation activists that the Sumatran rhino population can still be saved. The visual capture of the Sumatran rhino in West Kutai is recorded as the first visual evidence that this two-horned mammal also roams the forests of East Kalimantan. Previously, aside from Sumatra, the rhino was only seen in Serawak.
MAHARDIKA SATRIA HADI
