Continuing on with our Primate Conservation module, Vietnam, we're going to go ahead and jump right in and start talking about threats to primates. So at the end of the video wanted you guys to think about what are some of the threats that immediately came to mind. We'll see how you guys did that and how it pans out. Pretty certain you got a good solid handle on it. Okay, continuing on with some of the background. Vietnam is a rapidly developing country where economic gains are often prioritized over environmental protection. Really not any different than what we see in the US, and what we see in many other countries. That's why again, just really wanted to reiterate that this is not an us versus them or over there over here kind of thing. This is a global thing that we are dealing with, that we are seeing some of the dire consequences of in both health of our forest, health of nature, health of our waterways, and in biodiversity. Okay, many of its endangered plants and animals, including its primates, are at risk of extinction. So Vietnam really is at a crossroads where it needs to seek a balance between development and conservation. So here's the positive thing. There are a host of institutions working on conservation and environmental protection. So these are both, and most importantly, Vietnamese lead organizations, Vietnamese government organizations, international organizations that are really looking to build capacity and build and develop within the country. So we really are getting extremely positive changes in a number of areas. Still lots of work to be done, but it's not as if everyone is thrown in the towel, packed up and said, forget it, we can't do it. Okay, the major reasons for risk of extinction is if we just put it in a very wide term, unsustainable human activities. Now these activities include hunting, deforestation, extensive new road construction, large-scaled industrial agriculture, dam building, a host of extractive activities, and the international illegal wildlife trade. Just about every single threat that we talked about in terms of the greater idea of primate conservation, we see at play within Vietnam. Okay, road construction, here we have three different examples. The one on the left is through an area in the south of Vietnam and it goes through a forest area called [inaudible] and while it made for a great transportation from Dalat, so a nice mountain town, mountain outpost that was set up by the French, which gets very hot in Ho Chi Minh City, so they would retreat up into Dalat down to the coast, down to Nia Jang. So it cuts transport time down, but it also opens up all this forest and all this kind of area that was very well protected before. Then down in the center there is an area called [inaudible] or [inaudible] , and it's right along the border. Again, habitat fragmentation, habitat disturbance, and now an easier flow of people into these forest in protected areas, and then the third is from Central Vietnam and looking at again, an area through the forest, it doesn't have cement anything else down but you can still see that there's very large trees that are being cut down in order to open up this road. Okay, dam construction. You've got a number of river systems, excuse me, that go through Vietnam and you have a lot of industry that's being developed and manufacturing that's being developed and all of these need power of some sort. So there's been a large amount of dam construction throughout the country to help bring issues of power and power stability, but you can see just by these two photos that there is a large amount of environmental damage that's done. So you have to come through, you have to clear the area out, you're going to be bringing in a large number of people to these generally remote areas. It's going to be giving people a greater access to some of these protected areas and some of the animals that are there, so not only is it going to be the ecological damage of building the road, constructing the dam, flooding the area but you're all seeing inundating the area with more people. Extractive foraging and this one, again, I mean, from what we see, ties in very well with deforestation. There's two folks on the left-hand side there that are going through and taking non-timber forest products and then there's a lot of this redwood extraction, and this is a park on the coast of Vietnam called Nui Chua, and so they're going through and they're cutting out these trees, so selectively logging trees, taking this and then it's not unusual for them to strap it onto their backs and walk out of the forest. I've come across hunter, not hunting camps like this, I've come across these tree cutting camps in the forest before, both with rangers and by myself and seen the remnants of it where it's just there's pieces lying around, but you can clearly see where a large tree once was that now changes the forest dynamics by opening up the canopy and a lot of these areas. Traditional medicines. Animals are hunted for that, or animals are trapped or collected for it. So on the left, we've got two dukes that have been poached that are awaiting some final treatment. On the right, we can see there's a monkey in a jar, there's a bunch of snakes in jars. It's not unusual to find these at a number of both traditional medicine shops and then also in tourist destinations, there'll be lots of things that you'll find like a cobra in a bottle wine. For the most part, they're generally not cobras and a lot of time the wine's not actually strong enough, so all you're really doing is letting something rot inside of that. But something to think about again, when we talked about tourism, and we talked about making certain that you're not engaging in these practices and buying something that is illegal. A picture we've seen before but illegal hunting still is a serious problem in Vietnam. Here's a poached black-shanked douc but we've discussed how a number of animal species are hunted, a number of animal species are trapped and so something else that really kind of needs to continue to be addressed within the context of primary conservation, primary diversity within Vietnam. For the next video, we're going to go ahead and we're going to look at a couple of case studies. Remember, we've got 25 different species to choose from and rather than inundate you guys with all of it, just going to go ahead and give a little bit more information on a couple of the species. So more to come.
