Wasur National Park

Irian Jaya, which occupies the western half of the island of New Guinea, contains some of the most pristine habitat to be found in Southeast Asia. Despite a government resettlement scheme which brings immigrants to Irian Jaya from other, more crowded parts of Indonesia, and although the province is inhabited by hundreds of tribes, its population has remained surprisingly low.

Nearly 80 per cent of Irian Jaya is still covered with primary rainforest. Its coastal and marine habitats, with their spectacular mangrove swamps and exquisite coral reefs, are largely intact, and the province's freshwater swamps and peat bogs are some of the most extensive and undisturbed in the region.

Since the late 1970s, WWF has set up numerous projects in Irian Jaya, cooperating closely with both local people and government authorities in an effort to conserve the province's natural treasure trove.

One of these projects focuses on Wasur National Park in the Merauke district in the southeast of the province. The park contains a wide diversity of habitats - enormous open water swamplands, vast tidal mudflats, dry savannah grasslands, luxuriant mangroves, and verdant melaleuca and eucalyptus woodlands. Its wetlands attract huge numbers of the waders and waterfowl that migrate between northern Asia and Australia.

Some 2,500 indigenous people inhabit the park's 14 villages. These people have traditionally supported themselves through the sustainable hunting of animals such as deer, wallabies, and wild pigs. Recently, however, the government's transmigration programme has led to a growth in Merauke's population. Increasing numbers of outsiders have been coming into the park to shoot game, depleting the supply of wildlife, and generally degrading the area. As a result, the park has been unable to protect the plants and animals it was designed to conserve, and the traditional lifestyles of Wasur's indigenous residents have been seriously threatened.

Their lives were further disrupted in 1990, when the government decreed that people would no longer to be permitted to live within national park boundaries. WWF immediately set to work to show the government that protected areas can actually benefit from being inhabited. The people of Wasur had always restricted the quantities of game they hunted. Moreover, by carrying out other traditional land­use practices, such as burning off dead vegetation in the dry season, they were helping to maintain a healthy environmental equilibrium and protect the region's rich biodiversity.

In autumn 1992, the government agreed to allow the traditional inhabitants of Wasur to remain in the park and made them partly responsible for managing the park's resources. Under an innovative management scheme, only people who live within Wasur's boundaries are to be permitted to hunt and sell game from the park. They also have sole trading rights for other forest products such as fruits, nuts, and aromatic oils, and are the only people allowed to cut reeds and grasses to make baskets and mats. Indigenous Wasur dwellers now patrol for poachers and have finally been recognized as the legitimate "guardians of the park".

Source : nationalpark.na.funpic.org

Manusela National Park

Manusela National Park (186,000 ha) is situated in one of the world's least known regions, Central Ceram in the Maluku Archipelago of East Indonesia. Maluku together with Sulawesi and Nusa Tenggara Forms the biogeographic transition Zone between Asia and Australia, known as Wallacea, and on Ceram this transition becomes evident through the occurrence of both Asian and Australian biological spectra.

The Park includes examples of all Ceram's forest ecosytems, from sea level to the top of Mount Binaya at 3,027 m, the highest peak in Maluku, which gives a sense of real adventure to visitors with its impressive scenery, diversity, and abundance of flora, fauna and unique geological features.
The Manusela National Park pratects the watercathment area for the adjacent alluvial lowlands; conserves all Ceram's genetic resources and ecosystems, and provides an ideal area for education, scientific and tourism development.
Manusela's plant life is an impoverished derivative of the Asian (Western Malesia) flora with a few Australo-Papuan elements, which has evolved from an interaction of climates, geological history, and the evaluation processes. The result is a diverse, complex flora with several features. Many impressive and beautiful orchids occur, such as the lady's slipper orchid (Paphiopedillum) and many species of Bulbophyllum, Coloegyne, Dendrobium, Phalaenopsis (P. amboinensis) and the terrestrial ones, the Phaius species.

Though the Ceram flora is poor in species diversity in comparison with the neighbouring islands, as well as Sulawesi (Celebes) and Irian Jaya (West Papua), but phytogeographically it is important, because Ceram and the adjoining island functionally forms a land bridge for the transition zone between West and East Malesian flora, for an example, in Manusela National Park can be found at least three genera of the Dipterocarps a family which dominates the West Malaesian region.

The northern lowland alluvial plains comprise a diversity of vegetation types such as the mangrove, fresh-water swamp forest, the dry land and the hill mixture Dipterocarp-Agathis forest, and along the river banks, the Eucalyptus trees, form a quasi pure stands, and it gives an impressive scenery with a canopy to 50 m high.

The sub montane and montane vegetations, occupies almost one third of the park area (manusela, Merkele and Kobipoto ridges). Here can be found the Damar forest (Agathis alba) and grows in association with meranti (Shorea sp.), and sporadically, the dense bamboo forest and the thorny rattans make venturing off the cut paths almost impossible.

Most fascinating plantlife is the mossy or cloud forest extending upward from 1,500 m. Here gnarled, often stunted trees are covered thickly by mosses, lichens or orchids, and in this zone, the unique flower of the lady's slipper orchid usually grows on the steep limestone walls along a deep valley of the river.
The park's fauna is much less specialized than its plantlife, and is more representative of Wallacean region, as a transitional zone between Asian and Australian faunas. Typically Australian are the oriental and spotted phalanger, megapodes, cassowaries and numerous parrot species. In addition Ceram has 14 endemic birds, 6 endemic mammals, and several endemic butterflies, including the giant birdwing butterfly (Ornithoptera goliath procus) and the beautiful Delias (D. manuselensis).

Source : nationalpark.na.funpic.org