Continuing on. In the last little video, the last slide there was talking about in situ and ex situ conservation practices. That's where we're going to go ahead and we're going to start off our conversation here. Really what this is asking is, where do you try to protect the animal? Where do you try to protect the biodiversity? Where's the focus of your work? If we say in situ, we are talking about something that's in the original place, whereas if we talk about ex situ then we're talking about offsite conservation. Now, both of these definitely are very vital to the preservation and conservation of species and depending on how things are going within a particular area, that'll help to dictate what is going to be the most practical measure, most practical course for them. If we say in situ conservation, that's a set of conservation techniques involving the designation, management and monitoring of biodiversity in the same area where it's encountered. For this particular example, we can go ahead and we're going to be talking about Van Long Nature Reserve, which is in the North of Vietnam. The species that is going to be conserved is the Delacour's langur. This is a species that is endemic to Vietnam. It only lives in Vietnam and is restricted to a very small area, just this Van Long Nature Reserve. There are some possible remnant populations in Cuc Phuong National Park, but I'm fairly certain that those have considered to be completely extirpated. This is the Van Long Nature Reserve, and when you go there, it's a bunch of limestone hills, these limestone karst blocks. The monkeys live on these limestone areas and traverse around some of them. What you have is you've got a lot of smaller, fragmented populations, but there has been a lot of work to go ahead and protect them in situ, to protect them in this area. You've got ranger patrols, you've got conservation organizations that have come in and well, we can use this species, we can talk about both in situ and then we can also talk about ex situ conservation. One method of conservation of living organisms outside their natural habitat through genetic conservation includes both captive propagation of species and their eventual release into natural or restored ecosystems. This is the Endangered Primate Rescue Center. It is located in Cuc Phuong National Park, the area just mentioned also in Ninh Binh, so in the North of Vietnam, right outside of Hanoi. This rescue center works, again with Delacour langurs and what's nice is that well, they've been very successful in having a breeding program for this species and have worked to try to translocate, so take these animals that have been taken from illegal animal trade and rescued, put them into the center, rehabilitate them and they have animals both in these cages, so these more naturalistic enclosures. Then they've also built larger areas that basically is a portion of a forest block that's been sectioned off. They put a fence, they make certain that rangers are there and there's some provisioning of the animal, so they give the animal some food just so they can come and check up on the health of the animals. But you've got both this ex situ conservation. In this rescue center where they're getting medical attention, where they're getting food and if the situation works out, they can take these animals from this ex situ conservation, from this rescue center and bring them back to a natural area and release them into the wild. I wanted to look and make some comparisons between these two situations. As we said, in situ conservation is the conservation of biodiversity on site, so where they actually occur versus ex situ conservation of biodiversity away from the site of occurrence. For these things, we can say protected areas are the sanctuaries and national parks. Ex situ it's going to be artificial conditions are created to make their habitat almost like a natural habitat. If you've been to many zoos, zoos really no longer are just the box with cages that they may have once been in the past, now they really have gone to great lengths to give the animals this very naturalistic enclosure, to give them the opportunity to move about their environment, to forage in their environment, to more realistically simulate the area that they came from. Aims to enable biodiversity to maintain itself within the context of the ecosystem. In the natural habitat, you want to make certain that, that area is protected well enough that you can go ahead and have the biodiversity right there as it would be untouched. For ex situ, you're really looking at maintenance of genetic variation away from its original location. Again, to bring zoos up is an example of this, they will have a center called studbooks. It is the genetic lineages as best they know of the animals to make certain that there's not going to be inbreeding or anything else. They move animals from zoos to zoos in order to help spread genetic diversity. Establishes protected area networks. It establishes management teams, and we'll say local community teams. The final thing that they can really do in in situ conservation is try to create corridors to link certain fragments of habitat. If there's really good forests and then another area of good forest a short distance away, you can start to build these corridors, so they talk about reforestation, they talk about putting bridges or rope bridges or anything else that help link these various fragments. For ex situ conservation, we can have the establishment of botanical and zoological gardens and conservation stands. Essentially areas that have a far greater biodiversity value and ecological value, but are not necessarily natural in and of themselves. For in situ, you're really looking to main ecological integrity. For ex situ, you're trying to create artificial natural habitats for the endangered species, and protects from external threats like predation and poaching. Obviously, if you're trying to put an animal back into the wild, the first thing that has to happen is you have to have a good habitat for them. Second, you actually have to make certain that they're going to be protected. Otherwise, you've just taken this animal from illegal animal trade, capturing it from poachers, and you're just going to go ahead and throw it right back out there where it's going to turn back up again shortly or might be killed that time. Greater mobility to the animal species due to large habitat area. If it's still in its natural habitat, then there's the hope that there's enough room for this animal to move around within that area as opposed to an ex situ conservation situation where there might be less mobility to the organism because of a small habitat area. You can see by this list and through this conversation and through the example of Delacour's langur there's both positives and negatives to all of these things. The end of the day, we're really working to try to conserve the species. We're really trying to protect the species and keep it from extinction. To that end, there always is this discussion of creativity and flexibility within that. For the next lecture, what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and we're going to look at some of these organizations and some of the projects that they're working on. I really want you to start to think about, what are ways that you might be able to get involved? What are ways that we can possibly help in order to conserve a number of these species?
