Orangutan

There are three known species of orangutan, and GC project sites have two of them. These highly intelligent apes are among our closest relatives, sharing 97% of our DNA. Unfortunately, they are highly endangered and may be the first great apes to go extinct in modern times.

There are three species of orangutan. Global Conservation projects have two of them: the Bornean orangutan and the Sumatran orangutan. The third species, the Tapanuli orangutan, exists in a very small area on the island of Sumatra.

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Bornean Orangutan

Common Name:

Bornean Orangutan

Scientific Name:

Pongo pygmaeus

IUCN Red List Status:

Critically Endangered

Threats:

Poaching and habitat loss

Weight: 

Males grow up to 90 kg (200 lb), while females are smaller, averaging 45 kg (99 lb)

Size:

Males grow up to 1.7 m (5.6 ft) tall, while females are 90 cm (3.0 ft) tall

Habitats:

Rainforests, low-lying peat forests

Continent:

Asia

GC Sites:

DaMaI Rainforest Complex, Borneo, Malaysia 

Partners:

Sabah Environmental Trust, Sabah Forestry Department, Sabah Foundation, Sabah Department of Wildlife

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Sumatran Orangutan

Common Name:

Sumatran Orangutan

Scientific Name:

Pongo abelii

IUCN Red List Status:

Critically Endangered

Threats:

Poaching and habitat loss

Weight: 

Males grow up to 90 kg (200 lb), while females are smaller, averaging 45 kg (99 lb)

Size:

Males grow up to 1.7 m (5.6 ft) tall, while females are 90 cm (3.0 ft) tall

Habitats:

Rainforests, low-lying peat forests

Continent:

Asia

GC Sites:

Leuser Ecosystem, Sumatra,  Indonesia 

Partners:

Rainforest Action Network, Leuser Conservation Forum/Forum Konservasi Leuser (FKL), HAkA (Forest, Nature and Environment of Aceh), Wildlife Conservation Society

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Orangutan Global Population Size Over Time (all three species) by Year and Estimated Population:

1920 — 230k

2020 — 62.3k

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Orangutans are fruit-loving tree-dwellers that live exclusively in Asia, the only great ape found in the wild outside of Africa. These highly intelligent apes are among our closest relatives, sharing 97% of our DNA. Unfortunately, they are highly endangered.

All three species of these primates are now on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, with their populations continuing to decline. Not only are they facing an unsustainable loss of their habitat due to agricultural expansion, but they are also being hunted to extinction.

Global Conservation stepped in to help protect orangutans and their homes in Malaysia’s DaMaI Rainforest Complex and Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem starting in 2015. Support has ranged from providing resources to effectively monitor land, to arresting illegal poachers, to enabling the successful prosecution of a major palm oil company. 

If the loss of Indonesia's forests continues, orangutans may become the first great ape to go extinct in modern times.

Did you know? The word “orangutan” comes from the Malay words ‘orang’ meaning person and ‘hutan’ meaning forest.

Threats and Habitat Loss

Orangutans’ homes are being devastated predominantly due to a single monoculture crop: palm oil. Palm oil has become the world’s most widely used vegetable oil; imports into the US have leapt by 485% in the past decade. Palm oil is present in many fast foods and roughly half of all package goods in your local supermarket, from lipstick and shampoo to cookies and bread.

Despite pledges made by the president of Indonesia to stop further clearing of virgin forests in national parks and protected areas for palm oil plantations, legal and illegal clearing of intact forest ecosystems continues at a rapid pace.

Every year, millions of hectares of rainforest are being cleared for palm oil plantations, roads, and factories in ecosystems including South America’s Amazon Rainforest, Africa’s Congo Basin, and various forests across Indonesia and Malaysia–the only two countries where orangutans live in the wild.

Forest clearing causes habitat destruction and fragmentation which not only leads to substantial loss of biodiversity but also eliminates countless years of carbon storage through the destruction of peatlands, which is the exact habitat where orangutans tend to live. 

According to Global Forest Watch, Indonesia has destroyed over 10 million hectares of primary forest, an area bigger than the island of Ireland, over the last two decades. Indonesia is the third largest carbon emitter in the world; 80% of those emissions come from deforestation. 

While forest clearing to expand and develop palm oil farms is the leading threat to orangutans, they are also frequently hunted. They are poached for food, the pet trade, or killed in retaliation when they are driven out of their homes by habitat destruction and are forced to explore human land for food or shelter. 

“It’s vital that we keep forests not only for orangutans and other animals, but also for people.”

- Panut Hadisiswoyo, Chairperson at Orangutan Information Centre

Conservation Action

To protect orangutans and their habitat from all angles, we have been funding the scientific research of Dr. Ian Singleton with the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP), science-based projects conducted by SOS Leaf and Forum Konservasi Leuser, and on-the-ground protection work administered by The Orangutan Project and Hutan.

In 2017, Global Conservation started implementing park protection plans in Leuser Ecosystem and DaMaI World Heritage Site.

Global Conservation supported the Leuser Ecosystem by enabling the arrest and successful prosecution of one of Indonesia’s most notorious palm oil companies, resulting in a $26 million fine upheld in Indonesia’s Supreme Court, one of the first major rulings for illegal forest destruction upheld in the country’s history. Since then, the team has made good progress fortifying protection of over 1 million hectares of the core zone of the Leuser Ecosystem, the last place on Earth where tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutans still live together.

Our work predominantly involves deploying Global Park Defense against wildlife poaching and illegal land clearing through an integrated park and wildlife protection systems in the areas that need protecting. These monitoring systems include satellite communications, SMART ranger patrols, community intelligence, and UAV drones and aerial surveillance to effectively patrol vital protected land and the species that depend on it.

Fighting Palm Oil and Deforestation

Our partner FKL works with local communities to remove illegal crops like palm oil and rubber and restore the land with native trees. In 2019, FKL removed more than 11,000 oil palm trees, totaling an area of more than 130 hectares. They successfully restored 357 hectares of forest and planted more than 70,000 native trees. Through strategic land acquisition, they have secured another 971 hectares for conservation across the Leuser Ecosystem. Global Conservation also helped purchase the entire 12km riverfront across from Gunung Leuser National Park.

Drone image of a restoration area in the Leuser Ecosystem. Drone images like this can help conservation managers monitor the progress of restoration and the scale of the initial damage.

We are also supporting Rainforest Action Network's fight against conflict palm oil: palm oil that has been produced illegally, in violation of human rights or labor laws, or by the destruction of rainforests or carbon-rich peatlands. 

Fortunately, our partners have made great progress in Leuser. Funded in part by Global Conservation, Rainforest Action Network and Indonesian NGOs like the Leuser Conservation Forum (FKL) have slowed the annual destruction of the Leuser Ecosystem in the past five years; less than 0.3% of Leuser’s forests were destroyed in 2018-2019, and since 2015, deforestation in the Leuser Ecosystem has been reduced by 65%.

Monitoring Orangutans in the Leuser Ecosystem 

Monitoring orangutan populations in the Leuser Ecosystem is particularly challenging. Traditionally, researchers have estimated orangutan populations by walking line transects through the rainforest and counting orangutan nests. However, their habitat is dense and difficult, requiring significant time and funding. Sometimes, researchers need to cut a path through the dense undergrowth, and they can typically only walk two kilometers of transect per day. With total transect lengths reaching 100km or more, research teams often spend the better part of a month conducting one survey.

Methods that are often used to estimate populations of ground-dwelling species aren’t of much use; because orangutans move through the trees in threedimensional space, camera traps are unlikely to capture them. Due to these challenges, researchers have been unable to conduct population counts at a high enough frequency to accurately monitor changes.

Researchers at Conservation Drones figured out that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could address this problem. By flying fixed-wing UAVs in a pre-programmed pattern above the forest, researchers could capture thousands of high-resolution images of the forest canopy. They could then scour these images for orangutan nests, producing an accurate count of the number of nests in a given area. Although these nests must currently be counted manually, researchers are working on training artificial intelligence to detect nests in the images.

Orangutan nest as seen from a drone. Image courtesy of Orangutan Nest Watch.

Researchers chose fixed-wing UAVs because they are faster than quadcopters and can fly further on a single battery. Even though fixed-wing UAV surveys are faster and cheaper than walking transects, able to fly 50km in 40 minutes, they tend to differ from foot-transect surveys in how many nests they detect. Therefore, the first step to implementing this new technology was to conduct both survey types in the same area and then compare the results. After doing this enough times, researchers were able to calculate the error and accurately estimate populations using UAV surveys alone.

Most recently, researchers have begun to add thermal cameras to the drones, helping them to detect orangutans even more reliably using their heat signatures.

Orangutans (left) and proboscis monkeys (right) have unique heat signatures, allowing researchers to count them using thermal cameras mounted on drones. Images courtesy of Liverpool John Moores University and WWF.

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