Indonesian Wildfires 20 Days From Borneo Orangutan Camp — SkimNews
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- Indonesian wildfires reached within 200 metres of the Rangkong research station (a satellite of Cabang Panti) in Gunung Palung National Park, with scientists projecting the main flames will reach Cabang Panti itself in 20 days without large firebreaks or intervention.
- Prof Cheryl Knott of Boston University has led research at Cabang Panti for 32 years in one of the world's longest-running studies of wild apes; work there established that orangutans reproduce only once every eight years — the longest birth cycle of any mammal.
- More than 2,500 Bornean orangutans are thought to inhabit the park, and field teams observed five long-term study individuals fleeing the fire, some only metres from the flames, according to Wahyu Susanto of Indonesian NGO Yayasan Palung.
- El Niño-driven drought fueled the crisis: West Kalimantan has gone months without rainfall, the fires were set intentionally for land clearing but escaped control, and Indonesian meteorologists forecast an intense fire season persisting through October.
- A team of 40-plus field assistants, staff, and local villagers is fighting the fire around Rangkong day and night, building firebreaks and an improvised sprinkler system from a punctured hose to saturate the surrounding peat, which can smoulder underground for months.
- Prof Andrew Marshall of the University of Michigan, who ran an orangutan project at Cabang Panti from 2000 to 2020, said the station protects one of the only ecologically intact tracts of lowland tropical rainforest remaining in Borneo, and its continuous datasets are key to understanding how tropical ecosystems respond to climate shifts.
Why it matters: Cabang Panti holds 32 years of continuous data tracking the same individual wild orangutans from birth to grandmotherhood — a dataset researchers call 'unparalleled' that cannot be rebuilt if lost. With all three orangutan species already critically endangered and flames projected to reach the camp in 20 days, the fire threatens not just a research building but irreplaceable scientific infrastructure for understanding how Borneo's rainforests and apes adapt to accelerating climate change.
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