Capacity building for protected areas' rangers

Our organization has been working with protected areas' administration and rangers of the Small Gobi area since 2008. 

In 2016, we started a training program dedicated to park rangers, community leaders and border troops officers. The training program was about ecology, biodiversity conservation and research methods (mostly about the use of camera traps).

The number of park rangers has increased since 2020 and we need now to train the new rangers as well as to provide all rangers and community leaders that we trained before with updated and additional training.

The new training program our organization is currently working on will be organized all year round using on-site, in-the-field and online training activities and knowledge assessments. Our online training activities will help develop a social distance training program that will contribute to keep our scientific team and the park administration's team and rangers connected and involved in training activities all year round to improve rangers and community leaders' learning and understanding of the curriculum's topics as well as to adapt to lockdown situations (e.g. Covid-19 pandemic situation) or other emergency situation that could prevent our team to travel to the Gobi Desert. 

Our curriculum will be about ecology, Gobi wildlife and their ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, threats affecting Gobi wildlife and their habitat, scientific methods, community-based conservation, environmental education and conservation tourism. On-site and in the field training activities will use a combination of traditional training activities, as well as inquiry-based and games-based activities. Knowledge assessments will be also regularly organized in order to follow-up the learning process of the trainees. 

We will also use the "training the future trainers" approach for protected areas' rangers as well as for other members of the local community trained. 

Members of the local community who will receive our training will be also involved in our research and conservation activities as Citizen conservationists and Guardians of the Gobi wildlife and ecosystem, and will be provided with technical equipment necessary for the research activities (camera traps, binoculars, GPS, etc).