ABSTRACT
We’re sitting in the park office of a protected area in southern Vietnam. We have driven down yesterday from Ho Chi Minh and just had lunch with the warden and his staff who are, as always, charming. My colleague and I are here to get feedback on the results of a monitoring programme the park has introduced and they have just finished the first systematic field survey. I don’t speakVietnamese so things go a little haltingly. However, everyone is very excited about the research. The monitoring officer starts to tell me what they found: Elephas maximus! I turn to my colleague from Hanoi and try to get it straight in my head – you mean they really just found elephants in the park for the first time? Well, yes they did. And this is a good park I think; keen young staff, good people working with them from the university in the capital, support from the government; it is just that they are quite a new protected area, with very few resources available and enormously tricky terrain to operate in. Someone told me in the Congo Basin a few years back that he estimated there was an area the size of France and Germany combined where scientists had no idea about the distribution of even large animals like elephant. Conservation under these circumstances cannot be as precise as the planners in central offices would like us to suppose, but it is often critically important in the face of rapid change and huge pressures on wildlife. Even in the places – especially in the places – where we still know so little about the variety of plant and animal species, protected areas play a key role in keeping them in existence.
