Clouded Leopard Project Grants Awarded

The CLP recently elected to award two mid-year grants to worthy projects in need of funding.

The first went to Dr. Susan Cheyne, Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, Oxford University for her Sabangau Felid Project in Indonesian Borneo. Susan has long been studying orangutans and gibbons in the region and recently expanded the project to research the behavior and ecology of the wild cats as well.

I had the good fortune of meeting Susan at the Clouded Leopard Conservation Summit and was very impressed with her commitment to learning about and conserving Borneo's wildlife. Our funding will help Susan and her team with these goals. For more details on the project visit her page on our website or check out the project's blog for updates.

The second grant was awarded to Dr. David Reed of the University of Louisville for a Small Carnivore Conservation Workshop to take place in Bangkok this November. We are very pleased to support this meeting as it is a direct offshoot of the Summit held in January. A group of researchers working in Thailand realized the need to continue networking to gain a more complete picture of the distribution and status of Thailand's small felids and other carnivores in order to develop research and conservation priorities. The goals of the workshop are to compile, disseminate, and eventually analyze existing data on small carnivores in Thailand. Researchers will bring data to the meeting from over ten years of carnivore surveillance in the region, greatly expanding the collective body of knowledge on these species. Meeting participants also aim to develop standardized protocols for conducting research on small carnivores in SE Asia. We wish them success in bringing all this disparate data together to benefit carnivore conservation.