Conservation news from the
S
ambava-
A
ndapa-
V
ohemar-
A
ntalaha region of NE Madagascar
JULY 2015
Vol. 4, No. 1
Extensive New Boundary Demarcation of
Marojejy National Park
Since 2012 SAVA
Conservation has been
providing employment
and raincoats to local
forest guards (“CLP’s
or Comités Locale du
Parc”) who assist park
rangers with forest
monitoring as well as
installation of park
boundary signs. 105
new metal boundary
signs, as well as red
paint
on
trees
between them, have
been installed over the
past few years through
our program (see Map
on Page 3). In
northern Madagascar,
local confusion about the location of park boundaries and their permanence has been
reported for recently gazetted national parks such as Masoala and Marojejy as well as long
standing special reserves such as Ankarana and Anjanaharibe-Sud (Gezon, 1997; Ormsby
and Kaplan, 2005).
Insufficient boundary demarcation has contributed to the shrinking sizes of some of
Madagascar’s national parks and other protected areas. Marojejy National Park was
fortunate to be professionally re-demarcated in 2008 by a geographer. The official “new”
size of Marojejy is 55,500 ha, which is considerably smaller (45.5 km2) than the previous
official size (60,050 ha) specified in the original decree for this protected area (Schweter,
2008). The park has a perimeter of 205 km but only 92 historic concrete boundary markers
(“bournes”) delimit this boundary. Some bournes are separated by as much as 9km. It is
the large areas between these original concrete markers which have been deforested in
some cases.
For some reserves, such as Masoala National Park, the exact size and boundary seems to
be unclear even now since very different sizes have been published (for the terrestrial
protected areas on the peninsula), e.g. 220,500 ha (IUCN and UNEP-WCMC, 2015), 230,000
by Dr. Erik Patel
Signs are placed at strategic locations around Marojejy to clearly mark the
national park boundary.
I NS I DE TH I S
I S SUE :
S P EC I A L PO I NT S
OF I NTER E S T :
