The Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve REDD Project

purchases more than $24 million dollars in goods and servicesfrom more than 850 Florida vendors each year.In addition, the Tribe pays $3.5 million in federal payroll taxes. Afacilitated exchange of information and experience should helpProject Zone communities to develop a thriving ecotourismprogram in cooperation with the Rimba Raya Reserve over thecourse of the project lifetime.Orangutan Release and TrackingAn important focus of activity for the project, is to develop andimplement a tracking program in order to collect information onorangutans released in Rimba Raya. This program will build onthe work of Dr. Biruté Galdikas and OFI and advance conservationscience and orangutan research in an understudied area. Thisproject will also be used to disseminate information about thisnew for-­‐profit national park conservation model, through globaloutreach and education program focusing on the work of Dr.Biruté Galdikas, OFI and affiliated researchers.Orangutans are notoriously difficult to track, and the migrationpatterns of male orangutans remain relatively unknown. As partof this project activity, all released orangutans will be implantedwith and tracked by state-­‐of-­‐the-­‐art biotrackers, developedspecifically for the project by SirTrack. A sample of male subjectsfrom each cohort of rehabilitated orangutans released in thereserve will be particularly targeted using this tracking device toaddress questions about male movement patterns. Thebiotrackers will allow Dr. Galdikas and her research team to trackthe migration patterns of all research subjects as they movewithin Rimba Raya Reserve and into Tanjung Puting NationalPark.SirTrack’s system is based onthe “Sky Ranger”hardware/software that ismounted on a small plane forremote detection of up to 130 targets across 14,000 ha usingintelligent search strategies. This system enables multiple, radio-­taggedorangutans to be simultaneously tracked in remote areasand across the full extent of Rimba Raya.144