In Indonesia’s Central Java province, two groups of Javan gibbons have become isolated in two small forest patches. To help the gibbons make their way to larger forest areas, a local NGO, SwaraOwa, is working with farmers in the region to restore and build “corridors” that would connect the fragmented forest blocks, Mongabay reported in a video published in June. Javan gibbons (Hylobates moloch), known locally as owa, are only found on the island of Java and are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List. Only 4,000 individuals are thought to remain in the wild, with many confined to increasingly fragmented forest patches due to logging, agriculture and infrastructure. Two such Javan gibbon groups, one with five members and the other with four, live in two tiny forest patches isolated from a larger forest area by farms and settlements. The gibbons have little canopy cover to move between the forests. “From about 2000 until the end of 2010, hunting of primates was still massive, especially gibbons and langurs. Sometimes people hunted them to sell their meat, sometimes to sell their offspring,” Alex Rifai, a farmer from Mendolo village, said in the video. But then SwaraOwa (“Sound of the owa” in Indonesian) started educating farmers about the biodiversity treasure on their doorstep: that the Javan gibbon is one of five primate species on the island that’s found nowhere else on Earth. “That was a point of pride for us, we were like, ‘Wow, we have to protect them,’” Rifai recalled.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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