Capacity building for protected areas' park rangers

Our organization has been working with protected areas' administration and rangers since 2008. 

In 2016, we started a training program dedicated to park rangers, community leaders and border troops. 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 in 2020 and we need no 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 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. 

The curriculum's topics will be as following: 

-Ecology, 

-Biodiversity and biodiversity conservation, 

-Ecology of the Mongolian khulan and its ecological services, 

-Characteristics of the Gobi Desert ecosystem ad its ecological services, 

-Wildlife-friendly observation and community-based tourism, 

-Research methods. 

Park rangers and border troops' officers will be involved in our research activities and will be provided with technical equipment (camera traps, binoculars ...).