Last year JRS embarked on a collaborative partnership with Tusk Trust. funding four 12-month JRS capacity-building grants to be administered by Tusk’s experienced Programs team.  As the projects come to a close, we hear from the grantee team at OELO, a Gabonese NGO with a mission to conserve biodiversity and ensure ecosystem services in the Bas Ogooué lake region by mobilizing and supporting local communities.

During the project period, the team set up cameras in the Tsam Tsam ecotourism site on Lake Oguemoué and shared the following video and observations:

 

Forest elephants create watering holes in the interior of the forest that create important gathering points for multiple species. Over the course of about 6 weeks, this camera captured over 200 videos of wildlife, including 4 leopard encounters (a male and a female), 3 videos of giant pangolin, dozens of videos of elephants and red-capped mangabeys, as well as many other species. We put together a little compilation in no particular order: an elephant maintaining the hole while getting a good scratch, plumed guineafowl with red-capped mangabeys, a water chevrotain, male leopard passes in the daytime, a giant pangolin, a servaline genet scent marking a tree, TWO brush-tailed porcupines (we’ve never filmed them interacting before), a marsh mongoose, black guineafowl with blue duikers, female leopard, blue duikers being followed quite closely by an unidentified songbird, a passing silverback, a Congo serpent eagle feasting on a frog, a close-up of a mustached guenon, an elephant digging up roots, a brief glimpse of an African civet, and chimpanzees take a rest.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Some of the key achievements for the OELO project included:

· Expanded community-based freshwater fisheries monitoring from Lake Oguemoué to five additional lakes, exceeding the original target and completing a full year of baseline data collection across six lakes.
· Launched an online fisheries data portal and presented it to government agencies to support the development of official Fisheries Management Plans in 2027.
· Trained 10 community data collectors, nine of whom were retained, and four administrative partners. Established peer mentoring between lake teams and published the 2025 Oguemoué report documenting zero manatee bycatch, returning migratory fish, and increased catch per unit effort.

We are also pleased that JRS grants have helped establish a strong foundation for future sustainability as OELO leveraged JRS support to secure multi-year funding from the Darwin Initiative, Maliasili/MacP, and UNDP SGP, extending monitoring through 2029.

See the full video on the OELO Facebook page here.

To read more about the JRS-TUSK Partnership to Support Biodiversity Monitoring Capacity for African Protected Areas and Conservation Leaders click here.