Only 30 Percent of Coral Reefs in Good Condition
MANADO, KOMPAS.com - The condition of coral reefs in Indonesia is quite critical due to damage in a number of central and eastern Indonesia. In fact, most coral reefs in Indonesia, which reached 60,000 square kilometers located in the two regions.
This was revealed in the Coral Triangle Workshop in Manado, North Sulawesi, Thursday (04/12/2012). Activities performed by the Bunaken National Park was followed by a number of observers terumbuh corals from a number of areas in eastern Indonesia.
Ari Rondonuwu of the Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Sam Ratulangi University, which launched the data Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), said only 30 percent of coral reefs in good condition, 37 percent in a state of being, and 33 percent severely damaged.
Coral reef monitoring carried out in 77 regions spread from Sabang to Raja Ampat Islands. "These data are worrisome given the position of Indonesia as a leader of the Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI) of the six countries that have coral reefs," said Ari. Six CTI member countries are Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Timor Leste. CTI secretariat is located in Manado.
Most of the world's coral reefs, about 55 percent, found in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Pacific Islanders, 30 percent in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea; 14 percent in the Caribbean, and 1 percent in the North Atlantic.
Meyti Mondong of Conservation International Indonesia revealed that coral reef damage done by unscrupulous residents of coastal fishing using bombs and potassium. This is evident in many areas in eastern Indonesia.
He also mentioned the coastal and marine areas in Raja Ampat face the threat of land activities less attention to the marine ecosystem. A number of island ring roads and ports are not sufficient to provide the green line as a buffer sediment into the sea.
According Meity, needed a solution to put a halt damage to coral reefs by increasing surveillance at sea and the constant socialization of coastal residents about the importance of coral reefs in human life.
As a function of coral reefs are home and breeding grounds and feeding thousands of species of fish, animals and marine plants. Coral reefs are also a protective coastal ecosystems since it will hold and break up wave energy so as to prevent the occurrence of abrasion and damage in the vicinity.
It is estimated that each healthy coral reef can produce 25 tons of fish per year. About 300 million people worldwide depend on a living coral reef.

Space weather: Cloudy, with a chance of solar flares

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Space weather scientists are racing to develop new techniques to predict solar storms that could take down the electricity grid. Good thing, too: the next surge is expected in 2013.
The first sign of trouble was the jammed signals from Radio Free Europe into Russia. Next came a spectacular display of northern lights that were visible as far south as Florida and Cuba. Then satellites orbiting the Earth’s poles went on the fritz. Not long after, the massive solar storm began to pummel the Earth itself. In the early morning hours of 13 March 1989, the entire electrical grid in the Canadian province of Quebec collapsed, plunging six million people into a cold winter darkness that would last for nine hours and lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and lost revenues.
That was two solar cycles ago. In early 2013, the Sun is expected to reach a peak in its activity once again. Since the 1989 incident, companies have strengthened their safeguards against solar storms taking out power grids. But since then we have also become more reliant on the very technologies that can be crippled by solar storms – a huge storm might affect radio communications and navigation signals from GPS satellites, as well as damage satellites and spacecraft in orbit around Earth. During a recent solar storm air traffic had to be re-routed away from polar regions to avoid losing communication. If there is a big one on its way, we need to know about it so that we can try to avert a major crisis.
Over the past few decades, scientists have stepped up their efforts to understand the Sun’s eruptions and the space weather created as a result. Detailed space weather forecasts that anticipate major solar storms would help companies and government departments that operate electrical grids, telecommunications satellites and radio stations.
But the accuracy of today’s forecasts is not high enough for operators to act upon them with confidence. Space weather forecasts are about as accurate now as terrestrial weather forecasts were two decades ago, says Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the chair of a 2008 US Space Studies Board report into space weather. There is plenty of room for improvement, “but we’re catching up rapidly,” he says.
Storms brewing
The Sun goes through a cycle, in which the number of sunspots on its surface rises and falls over a period of roughly 11 years. These dark blotches on the solar surface are sites of intense magnetic activity. They emit explosions of energy called solar flares and balloon-shaped bursts of charged particles called coronal mass ejections that race through space at several million miles per hour. As the solar maximum approaches in 2013, so the number of sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections will rise.
This solar cycle is relatively unusual, says Louise Harra, a solar physicist at Mullard Space Science Laboratory, at University College London. As well as the 11-year cycle there is also a much longer cycle that has produced 24 so-called “grand maxima” over the past 9,000 years – and the last grand maxima, which began in 1920, is reaching its end. The solar minimum in the current 11-year cycle lasted longer than expected and set a new record for low sunspot counts in 2008 and 2009, so scientists have predicted that the solar maximum will not be as impressive as earlier ones. “We are getting large events but we're not getting as many as we would have been in the previous cycle,” says Harra.
Not that this should make us complacent, says Mike Hapgood, head of the space environment group at RAL Space, in Didcot, UK. There is no evidence that these long-term trends affect the intensity of any individual burst of solar activity, he wrote in a commentary in the journal Nature. “We need to develop safeguards against the entire range of possible events that can be generated by [coronal mass ejections],” he said.
If Earth does find itself in the line of fire of any large event, we are reasonably well protected from solar flares. The Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere shield us from much of the high-energy particles and radiation they produce. But X-rays blasted out in solar flares can penetrate deep into a part of the upper atmosphere called the ionosphere, which can disrupt radio waves, causing radio blackouts.
Coronal mass ejections pose a much greater problem. These charged plasma clouds move through space at speeds approaching 75,000 miles per minute (120,000km per min), continuously producing energetic particles as they go. The Sun emits one coronal mass ejection per week during a solar minimum, but as many as three per day during a solar maximum. They can damage or destroy satellites outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field and force commercial airlines to re-route flights away from the polar regions. And it can happen very quickly, says Daniel Baker, “just a few hours after the disturbance on the Sun, or sometimes even less.”
When a coronal mass ejection collides with the Earth, it rattles the Earth’s magnetic field and can cause a geomagnetic storm. As the storm moves over long electrical transmission lines it produces current down the line, generating heat that can overload and blowout high-voltage transformers, and bring cities – or entire regions – to a standstill. Just like what happened in Quebec in 1989.
Better forecasts
Today’s space-weather forecasters know whether a solar storm will hit the Earth about one or two days in advance. “That’s state of the art,” says Yihua Zheng, a chief forecaster at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Space Weather Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Zheng and other forecasters use data gathered by a trio of orbiting spacecraft to identify the presence, direction and speed of coronal mass ejections. “Slower [coronal mass ejections] can take between three and five days to reach the Earth, but we care more about the faster ones,” she says, because they tend to be more dangerous.
Zheng is part of a group developing a computer technique, known as ensemble forecasting, to improve NASA’s ability to predict the path and impact of severe solar storms. Ensemble forecasting is already used by meteorologists to track severe weather, like hurricanes, on Earth, but this is the first time is will be used to make sense of space weather.
The technique will allow Zheng and her colleagues to produce as many as 100 computerized forecasts by varying the speed, direction and other parameters of coronal mass ejections in their models, instead of being restricted to one set of solar-storm conditions, as they are now. It would decrease the margin of error, which currently stands at seven or eight hours, and lead to more reliable forecasts. Zheng expects the ensemble forecasting method will be up and running no later than the end of this year – just in time to catch the next solar maximum.
Still, forecasters would be at a major advantage if they could predict a coronal mass ejection in advance, rather than chasing it down after it had erupted. Stathis Ilonidis, a graduate student in physics at Stanford University in California, is tracking the sound waves that travel through the Sun’s interior to predict where a sunspot will appear one or two days in advance. And as coronal mass ejections often come from sunspots, this information could be of enormous help to space weather forecasters.
By some quirk that physicists do not yet entirely understand, sound waves travel faster through sunspots than through the rest of the sun’s interior. Ilonidis measures how long it takes a sound wave to travel from one point on the Sun’s surface to a depth of 37,000 miles and back up to another point. On average, it takes a sound wave an hour to bounce from one point to another 93,000 miles away, but a sound wave passing through a sunspot may shave 12 to 16 seconds off its time. By repeating the process with millions of pairs of points, Ilonidis can chart out a map that identifies regions where travel time is significantly shorter than expected – locations where sunspots are likely to appear. "This is the first time that we can actually detect sunspots inside the sun," says Ilonidis.
Ilonidis cannot run the technique in real time yet, mainly because he does not have access to computers powerful enough to run a live analysis, but he is hopeful that in the next couple of years it could be used to scan the whole surface of the Sun and predict the formation of new sunspots. Such an advanced warning system could buy us a few extra days notice of an impending solar storm.
Impact monitor
Once a solar storm reaches Earth, forecasters need to know how it will react with the particles and magnetic field surrounding the planet. A trio of CubeSats, tiny satellites weighing around 3kg (6.6lb) and made with mostly off-the-shelf components, is about to join the larger missions already orbiting Earth like Nasa’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO).
The miniature-satellite mission, called TRIO-CINEMA, is a collaboration between the University of California Berkeley, Kyung Hee University, South Korea, and Imperial College London. Each of the CubeSats will carry two instruments: MAGIC, which will measure variations in Earth's magnetic field, and STEIN, which will monitor fast moving particles.
MAGIC is around the size of a pound coin, making it smaller and less power-hungry than sensors that do the same job in larger satellites. "Mass, volume, and power are all very limited in these tiny spacecraft," says Robert Lin of UC Berkeley, who leads the mission. Though less sensitive, having sensors on a constellation of CubeSats will give scientists a global picture of what is happening in Earth's magnetic field, something not possible with a sensor on a single spacecraft. STEIN will monitor both charged and neutral particles as they interact with Earth's magnetic field and radiation belts, enabling scientists to create maps and movies charting the particles' behaviour.
The first CINEMA CubeSat will launch in summer 2012, with the other two later on in the year. To keep costs down the CubeSats will hitch a ride on other missions to reach their orbit 600km above Earth. Data from TRIO-CINEMA will help scientists understand the behaviour of the near Earth environment and feed into space weather forecasting models, says Lin.
Global system
At the moment, space weather alerts and reports are done on a piecemeal basis. The Goddard Space Flight Center forecasters provide space weather information to all Nasa robotic missions. A new European system called SPACECAST provides radiation forecasts to help satellite operators protect their equipment. And NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center provides alerts and forecasts to power grid operators, commercial airlines, radio operators and other companies who need them, as well as government agencies.
But the Space Weather Prediction Center relies on the strength of data available, and right now there are only a few dedicated operational space weather-monitoring systems around the world. Baker thinks the entire suite of monitoring and alert systems could be better integrated to provide a global effort to protect the Earth from space weather. “Let’s, as a nation, but also as a world, since space weather knows no boundaries or borders, really pool our resources, our assets and put together a much more dedicated, operational worldwide space weather system,” he says. A first step would be an international agreement to share all data, then agreements on observing responsibilities of each nation. “Every nation could do its share and everyone would benefit,” he says.
A global system could offer tailored forecasts and alerts, as not every industry or company has the same concerns about various types of space weather. For example, military systems are robust and can operate through almost every type of disturbance and would not benefit from a forecast, says Baker. But satellite operators and power companies could take some mitigating steps to reduce the likelihood that their spacecraft might fail or their grids might shut down. “They could be prepared to divert power from one sector to another. They could spin-up more back-up capabilities and really weather the storm, especially if they knew exactly where the most powerful electromagnetically induced currents were,” he says.
Since the 1989 storm that knocked out Quebec’s electrical grid, the Canadian energy company Hydro-Quebec has strengthened its transmission system to fend off a repeat event. It has increased trip levels across the grid to allow equipment to weather bigger disturbances without shutting down automatically, and put into action an alert system that enables real-time monitoring of the grid, among other things. Other power grid operators are looking for ways to brace themselves for a big solar storm too. The National Grid in the UK has plans that include preparing to bring all transformers into action to reduce the load on individual ones, and even making controlled power cuts to prevent damage to the grid.
But the world has also changed. Roughly two billion more people live on the planet today than in 1989. We are consuming more energy on a per capita basis today then we did then and our electrical grids are aging. “Compared to twenty years ago – two solar cycles ago – the power grid is probably operating much closer to the edge,” says Baker. “If we had a storm like that next week, I think it’s an open question as to how the world’s power system would respond.”

Per month, 30 Tail Hawk Bird Sale on the Market

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com - Survey of Jakarta Animal Aid Network (JAAN) indicates that wildlife trade is still thriving in Jakarta, of which performed at the Bird Market Scout.

"A month there were 30 eagles are traded on the Bird Market Scout," said Pramudya Haezani of Kompas.com JAAN when found in the Earth Day action at the Roundabout Hotel Indonesia Jakarta, Sunday (04/22/2012).

"I thought of baseball? If one eagle habitat cover 4 square acres, it means that 120 acres 30 square tail. It's just wipe out that bird market animals in our ecosystem," said Pramudya.

Animals are bought and sold not only hawk. There are also repeated, lemurs, monkeys and Macaca. For the lemurs, an estimated 60-80 tails are sold each month. This figure is only counted at the Bird Market Scout

Jakarta itself has three bird markets, namely Barito Bird Market, Bird Market and Bird Market Ngasem Jatinegara. Scout Bird Market, according to Pramudya, is the largest sale of wildlife in Southeast Asia.

Pramudya said the ongoing activities of the illegal wildlife trade in bird markets showed that the government still underestimate the activity. "The government, not only governments but also the Ministry of Forestry, but especially, should be concerned about wildlife trade issues," said Pramudya.

JAAN along with several other NGOs who are members of the League Against Wildlife Trafficking (laps) demanding the closure of bird markets. Closure may be detrimental to some, but to help rescue biodiversity.

A number of NGOs involved in action today include Animal Friend Jogja, Tiger Forum Kita, Pro-Fauna, Raptor Indonesia (RAIN), Eagle Sanctuary and Center for Orangutan Protection (COP).

Earth Day 2012 - Mobilize the Earth

 
As the 42^nd Anniversary of Earth Day approaches, people are becoming frustrated with the failure of governments to take any steps toward protecting and preserving the environment. The Earth Day 2012 campaign is designed to provide people with the opportunity to unite their voices in a call for a sustainable future and direct them toward quantifiable outcomes, using vehicles such as petitions, the Billion Acts of Green; campaign, and events. 
Earth Day 2012 will act as a launch pad for growing the environmental movement and will put forth a bold declaration demanding immediate action to secure Renewable Energy for All and a sustainable future for our planet. The movement will be comprised of individuals of every age from all corners of the Earth, and will call upon local, national, and international leaders to put an end to fossil fuel subsidies, embrace renewable energy technology, improve energy efficiency, and make energy universally accessible.

What can YOU do to Mobilize the Earth?
Throughout the month of April 2012 and on Earth Day (April 22), Earth Day Network and its wide range of partners will organize and promote events to help Mobilize the Earth.  In addition to organizing Earth Day events around the world, Earth Day Network will run the following campaigns:

A Billion Acts of Greenreg;
Individuals, organizations, businesses and governments can voice their support for the campaign by performing environmental actions and lending their names to this global referendum demanding change.  Our goal is to reach one billion actions by the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June 2012.  We will present this accomplishment at Rio +20 and use it as a lever to address the UNrsquo;s inaction and inspire leaders to reach a global agreement at the Rio+20 Conference.

Campaign for Communities
Today, local leaders around the world are at the forefront of addressing the impacts of climate change and other environmental challenges facing their communities while at the same time struggling to balance budgets, create jobs, and produce energy savings. Campaign for Communities, previously known as Global Day of Conversation, is a platform for leaders around the world to engage their communities in discussions about the challenges and opportunities related to sustainability. Through organized dialogues, leaders will convey their ideas and opinions on environmental issues and share best practices, allowing citizens to learn about ongoing initiatives and provide input on current sustainability plans.

K-12 Earth Day and Reading for the Earth
Educating todayrsquo;s youth about environmental sustainability has the power to capture the attention of students, teachers, parents, the community, and beyond. Earth Day 2012rsquo;s education mission is simple: encourage as many students as possible to participate in Earth Day activities that teach the importance of civic and environmental responsibility. In addition, through the Reading for Earth program, Earth Day 2012 will work with communities and libraries to promote environmental literacy and educate people about the importance of individual actions that reduce the worldrsquo;s carbon footprint.

Earth Day University - MobilizeU
Earth Day University will challenge students to exemplify their commitment to environmental activism by taking part in "MobilizeU", an international competition between universities to generate Acts of Green. The competition will be centered around four weeks of activism leading up to Earth Day 2012 that will engage students in various activities, such as registering new voters, collecting personal act-of-green pledges, leading community clean-ups, and organizing major Earth Day events.

Arts for the Earth and Athletes for the Earth
The Arts for the Earth and Athletes for the Earth campaigns aim to bridge the gap between the environmental movement and the arts and sports communities respectively. Through partnerships with individual athletes and artists, stadiums, museums, and events, Earth Day Network will organize various events worldwide and engage fans on the importance of sustainability.

Voter Registration
Earth Day Network and its partners are once again joining forces to reprise their successful civic participation work focusing on environmental issues among youth and communities of color and in low-income communities. Earth Day Network and  its Campaign for Communities partners share the belief that the only way to build a broader and more effective democracy is to help citizens, especially those in traditionally overlooked demographics, develop the skills they need to fully participate in the democratic process.

Petitions
Our petition demands the adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency targets, universal renewable energy access, and an end to all fossil fuel subsidies. We plan to deliver the petition to world leaders at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June, 2012.

Religious Outreach
Leaders from all faiths have published a vast array of resources that demonstrate that stewarding and caring for the Earth is wholly consistent with a belief in their God. This year, thousands of religious leaders are preparing Earth Day Sermons to give to their congregations on the week of Earth Day.

Renewable Energy for All
Access to renewable energy resources will play a critical role in the shift to a more sustainable society.  Earth Day Network and TckTckTck are proud to announce a collaboration to mobilize communities worldwide to advocate for a sustainable future through the Renewable Energy for Allcampaign. The campaign will utilize Earth Day 2012 as a global action day to promote renewable energy initiatives and build support for comprehensive action at the UN Rio+20 Conference held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012.

For more information about Earth Day 2012 and the various campaigns, please visit http://www.earthday.org/2012

Nature's weirdest mating practices

 

The pressure, it seems, is proving too much for Yang Guang and Tian Tian, the giant pandas at Edinburgh Zoo.

The pair have been brought together to mate five times and, so far, have been unsuccessful.
With the zoo's experts struggling to create the perfect conditions for the panda couple to "get together", BBC Nature looks at the animal kingdom's strangest and most complicated mating rituals.

Bears' many neccessities

Female pandas ovulate just once a year and there is a 36 hour window during which they can get pregnant.

Tian Tian was making high pitched calls before her mate was put into her cage

Pandas in captivity often fail to mate within that time. And although there have been successful captive breeding programmes with giant pandas, most of them have relied on artificial insemination.
One issue could be Yang Guang's lack of motivation. In the wild, males gather around a female and compete for a chance to mate, at which point levels of the sex hormone testosterone increase in their blood. In zoos, this lack of competition could be problematic.
Nutrition is also crucial.
A study published last year in the European Journal of Wildlife Research revealed that pandas conserve their energy by keeping testosterone levels relatively low until they have found a female.
This is linked to the fact that the bamboo the animals eat gives them relatively little energy. It is so nutritionally poor that the bears have to consume about 20kg per day to take in enough calories.
This direct link between breeding and nutrition makes the destruction of their forest habitat even more problematic for the bears.
Panda expert Ronald Swaisgood, director of animal ecology at San Diego Zoo, California, US, told BBC Nature last year that - left to their own devices, in the perfect bamboo-rich habitat - the animals would "do just fine".

The trouble with captivity

The aardvarks at London Zoo "get along very well"

It is not just pandas that struggle to breed in captivity.
At London Zoo in the UK, keepers recently discovered that their pair of aardvarks were both female. Aardvarks are notoriously difficult to sex, because their genitalia are internal.
But John Ellis from London Zoo says that the animals "get along very well indeed".
The Zoological Society of London says it is currently working with the studbook holder for aardvarks in the European breeding programme, "so that we can introduce a male to our pair of females".

Anatomically 'choosy' ducks

A drake's bill colour communicates information about its sexual health

The humble duck has a very complicated sex life.
Both male and female ducks have unusual genitalia: males have corkscrew-shaped penises while females have labyrinthine vaginal tracts with a number of "dead ends" that do not lead to the uterus.
While male ducks attempt, often very aggresively to mate with females, the females have evolved the ability to close off their real reproductive tract to the sperm of unwanted partners.
Female mallards also appear to be able to tell if their partner is likely to be healthy and disease-free.
Research has also shown male mallards have antibacterial semen, and the more antbacterial this fluid is, the brighter the colour of the male duck's beak.
Females probably use bill colour as a visual cue when choosing a mate, to avoid sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Shouting and dancing

Male great bustards orientate their displays to the Sun, especially in the mornings

Elaborate displays are often a crucial part of the mating ritual in nature.
The mating season turns usually quiet male koalas into bellowing beasts. And when the males begin to call, females appear to move towards the male with the most impressive voice.
A koala's vocal tract anatomy is so unusually specialised, in fact, that they are able to make sounds that make them sound far larger than they are
While courtship dances are common in the bird world, great bustards - one of the largest flying bird species - have developed a trick to make their elaborate mating displays even more alluring to females.
An observational study recently revealed that the large birds lift and point their bottoms towards the Sun, making their bright white tail feathers more conspicuous.
The behaviour makes them more visible to females, say scientists.

Hungry mate

The female black widow spider is much larger than the male

There are many weird and somewhat gruesome mating habits in the world of insects and spiders.
Preying mantis females are notorious for their habit of tucking into their partner while he continues his attempt to copulate with her.
There are also many spider species where the female is known to devour the male after sex.
In black widows, the species most infamous for this practice, this appears to be more about nutritional necessity than a strange sexual habit.
A study published in 2011 in the journal Animal Behaviour, showed that male black widow spiders had a trick to avoid being eaten.
The males, it seems are able to sniff out a well-fed female simply by walking on her web and they use this technique to avoid the hungry females, which are much more likely to cannibalise them.

Sneaky sex tactics

Size is not everything in the world of zebrafish

In the aquatic world, becoming a father can be a game of wits.
A recent study published in the journal Ethology found that smaller zebrafish were able to "sneak" in between females and their larger male competition in order for a chance to fertilise the females' eggs.
Like many fish, male zebrafish fertilise eggs after they are laid, a process of external fertilisation known as spawning.

Transfer Function Urges Forest Borneo Pygmy Elephant Populations
JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com conservation organization WWF-Indonesia in its research from 2007 to 2011 revealed the existence of Borneo elephant (Elephas maximus borneensis) with an estimated population while at the range of 20-80 individuals in the northern region of East Kalimantan directly adjacent to Sabah, Malaysia.However, encroachment of forests for oil palm plantations that continue to occur causing the loss of habitat and home ranges of elephants of Borneo.The loss of forest habitat ranges Borneo elephants, making animals often called "Borneo pygmy elephant" or the Borneo pygmy elephant is pressed, thus sparking a conflict between humans and elephants.WWF data shows that from 2005 to 2007 there were approximately 16,000 plants and oil palm plantation companies owned by the destroyed eat an elephant. Of monitoring results, 2005 and 2009 there were 11 villages are prone elephant conflict. All these villages are located in Nunukan district, East Kalimantan.To reduce the risk of an elephant conflict, particularly in Sub Onsoi Tulin, Nunukan district, WWF Indonesia in cooperation with the Natural Resources Conservation Center (BKSDA) and the Government of East Kalimantan regency Nunukan help facilitate the formation of members of the Task Force (task force) mitigation konfik elephant whose members are drawn from the local community . The main task of the Task Force to conflict prevention and management of elephants."WWF Indonesia expects the operational support and assistance from the government and the private sector to members of the Elephant Task Force," said Agus Suyitno, Staff Elephant Conflict Mitigation in Nunukan WWF Indonesia, Wednesday (18/04/2012)."The government and all parties are expected to preserve the remaining forest elephant habitat, so that conflict does not grow," said Agus.In addition to cooperating with communities, governments and NGOs, WWF is also working with companies operating concessions in elephant habitat areas for the development and implementation of elephant conservation management plan, which is integrated in the sustainable management of the concession.Survey of WWF-Indonesia in 2010 and 2011 focus its activities on natural forest concession area of ​​PT Lestari Adimitra bypassed by major rivers such as the River District Nunukan Agison, Sibuda, Tampilon, Apan, and is the last habitat of elephants as well as the trajectory paths of Borneo in Indonesia .The survey aims to monitor the presence of elephants in its main habitat, so the latest information on habitat conditions, population and its movement can be detected."Participation of the private sector in the management of protected wildlife habitat, especially in its concession area, the key to the success of efforts to protect Borneo elephant," said Anwar Purwoto, Director of the Forestry Program, Endangered Species and Freshwater, WWF-Indonesia.