Ob Luang National Park covers part of the Doi Inthanon Range in Northwestern Thailand. It was created in 1992 adjacent to 20 years older Doi Inthanon National Park. With its 553 square kilometers it is slightly larger than Doi Inthanon National. The elevation of the park ranges from 200 meters to 1,656 meters above sea level, thus covering dry deciduous dipterocarp and bamboo forests on lower slopes and evergreen and pine forests on higher altitudes. During the first part of the 20th century much of the present park area was logged for teak and other hardwood. Around 200 bird species and 34 mammals have been reported, among them two rare goat species: the Serow and the endangered Goral.
Ob Luang National Park is one of the eleven protected areas chosen as project sites of the Joint Management of Protected Areas (JOMPA) project of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation under Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. The project is a sub-component of the Thai-Danish Programme for Co-operation in Environment.
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Archeological sites in the park with rock paintings indicate that humans have lived here for 4,000 to 5,000 years. Today northern lowland Thai (Khon Muang) live in parts of the fringe areas of the park and along the highway running through it. A few Hmong villages are found on higher altitudes, but the majority of the people inside the park are Karen (Pga k'nyau) who prefer to live on an altitude of around 1000m above sea level. They grow rice on terraced paddy fields and vegetables as cash crops on upland fields. The Karen and Hmong are heavily dependent on forest resources to cover their subsistence needs. Their traditional shifting cultivation has however been declared illegal and is thus practiced only in a few cases.
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In the 1980s and 90s Chomthong District, covering parts of Ob Luang National Park and adjacent Doi Inthanon National Park, was one of the hotspots of a conflict between lowland farmers and conservationists on one side, and indigenous highlanders on the other. The former called for relocation of the highland villages, which the latter managed to prevent by organizing themselves into a community network promoting sustainable resource management among their members, and advocating for a people-oriented approach in forest management and conservation. The conflict has somewhat died down but the indigenous communities still suffer from restrictions imposed on them by the park authorities and the insecurity due to the lack of recognition of land tenure and resource use rights.
The opportunities in Ob Luang NP for establishing collaborative management are two-fold: firstly there exists age-old environmental knowledge and conservation practices and, over the past decade, this can be complemented by experiences with modern community-based conservation approaches. Also Ob Luang National Park has been included in the JOMPA project whose aim is, among others, to make joint management operational in a range of protected areas in different parts of the country. Main activities will include developing models and systems for PA management including ecosystem/watershed management approaches, joint management between upland and lowland communities, developing human capacity for effective PA management and initiating replication through the wider PA system.
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“The following brief report describes a visit made to Khunpae Village by the Regional and Thailand CMLN Coordinators. During this visit options for sustainable agricultural development were discussed with a group of villagers who are implementing alternatives to monoculture cash cropping. Communities' sustainable land use has long been an important part of biodiversity conservation”. (
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