Uganda Wildlife Authority Training in Monitoring and Research

Monitoring and research are an important component of managing protected areas. Management needs to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Monitoring and research makes this possible. However, in protected area management this aspect is often overlooked and under-funded.

WCS is well known for its expertise in monitoring and research and as such we were approached by the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) to help them develop monitoring and research plans for all of their protected areas. A programme was developed jointly to create these plans and to provide staff training to enable them to implement the plans and interpret the results so that management could change its activities in light of these findings.

A programme was developed that brought all wardens of a protected area together to use the following process to develop the monitoring plans. This was modelled on several planning processes that have been developed and modified for this situation:

Identifying threats in Kibale National Park

1. Identify what is important about the protected area in question - key species, habitats and processes.
   
2. Identify the main threats to these species, habitats and processes.
   
3. Identify the existing strategies being used to tackle these threats.
   
4. Identify what parameters will be monitored to measure the intensity or impact of the threats.
   
5. Identify what will be measured for each parameter.
   
6. Identify who will be in charge of supervising the data collection and what method will be used to collect the data.
   
7. Identify when results will be summarised and reported on and who receives the report.

Much of the data that the UWA will use for day to day monitoring will be collected by rangers while on patrol in the parks. A programme of support to UWA funded by GTZ developed a computer program called MIST (Management Information System). MIST has many components but its main aim was to develop a package that would allow rangers to enter data on a computer while minimizing errors. This would allow basic analyses with simple menus while allowing more complex analyses if needed.

Example output of MIST showing the locations of all large mammal sightings in Murchison falls park during one quarter of the year.