The Conservation Data Gap
The world is facing a biodiversity crisis, and we can no longer afford to invest in ineffective conservation strategies.
Between 1999 and 2019, approximately USD 1 billion was invested in orangutan conservation. One might expect that their remaining distribution, population size, and trends would now be well understood.
Surprisingly, major knowledge gaps persist. Orangutans are inherently difficult to count: their densities are low, making direct surveys logistically challenging, and indirect methods, such as nest counts, often yield wide confidence intervals.
Optimising conservation requires a lot of data, yet such data are difficult to obtain using traditional, time-bound biodiversity monitoring approaches. Although widely used, these conventional approaches cannot deliver real-time metrics — a critical limitation when wildlife populations and their threats are changing rapidly.
KehatiKu: A Community-Driven Model for Outcome-based Conservation
Borneo Futures’ citizen science programme, KehatiKu, offers an alternative by working with the communities who live alongside orangutans and other wildlife. In Indonesian Borneo, Borneo Futures is among the first to generate near real-time updates on wildlife status in tropical forests, a necessity for outcome-based conservation.
Traditional biodiversity monitoring is often expert-driven and slow to respond to ecological change. By engaging people who encounter wildlife in their daily lives, continuous population data can be generated by those who know the environment best, while simultaneously creating direct financial incentives for conservation.
Through the KehatiKu programme, Borneo Futures collaborates with local communities who receive payments for verified wildlife observations. This creates a positive feedback loop: individuals receive immediate rewards for documenting wildlife, strengthening incentives to protect rather than exploit the rainforest, while contributing to an expanding dataset that supports evidence-based investment and adaptive management.
Real-Time Data for Adaptive Conservation
Between April and October 2025, nearly 500 community members from four remote villages submitted more than 70,000 verified wildlife observations. This dataset enables statistically robust estimates of wildlife occupancy. Occupancy is the likelihood of a species occurring in a particular site.
The programme’s wildlife index integrates occupancy data for eight species, weighted by IUCN Red List status, CITES listings, Indonesian legal protection, and species range. Together, these metrics provide a transparent and actionable snapshot of conservation status designed to guide adaptive management and targeted investment.
Opportunistic wildlife encounters are recorded through a mobile phone application and feed into a growing database of occupancy metrics. Within fewer than eight months of programme implementation, sufficient data had been collected to support statistical occupancy analyses.
Borneo Futures has now released the first wildlife index from the KehatiKu programme — a milestone for outcome-based conservation in tropical forests.
Recent analysis estimates mean orangutan occupancy at 0.42 (SE = 0.05) across 522 1 × 1 km grid cells. This estimate is based on 129 confirmed orangutan sightings, alongside 12,858 observations of other wildlife used to generate non-detections. Clear relationships are observed between orangutan occupancy, forest proximity, and elevation. Some drivers are likely ecological, while others reflect historical pressures.
In collaboration with partner organisations, Wildlife Futures and The Arcus Foundation, Borneo Futures aims to stabilise and ultimately increase orangutan populations — a long-term effort given the species’ slow reproductive rate.
Achieving this depends on strong support from local communities, who increasingly recognise orangutans as a valuable asset worth protecting and are empowered to reject developments that convert orangutan habitat.
[The images in this article were all taken by KehatiKu citizen scientists.]