A Technical Strategy for Restoring Krabi’s Lowland Tropical Forest

This report is one of the outputs from the project “Gurney’s Pitta Research and Conservation in Thailand and Myanmar”, implemented by the U.K.’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and sponsored by the Darwin Initiative. The aim of the report presented here is to respond to the lack of technical information available to effectively restore lowland tropical evergreen forest to deforested areas in peninsular Thailand, not only to re-establish habitat for Gurney’s Pitta, but also to promote recovery of many other species that are restricted to this unique and highly endangered forest type.

The recommendations presented in this report are based on the principles and techniques of forest restoration, develop by the Forest Restoration Research Unit of Chiang Mai University (FORRU-CMU) in northern Thailand (such as ANR, the framework species method and tree propagation techniques) since 1994 and subsequently modified to suit the ecological conditions of lowland tropical evergreen forest in peninsula southern Thailand. So, some of the material presented in this report is reworked from FORRU-CMU’s previous publications, which were also sponsored by the Darwin Initiative (“How to Plant a Forest” and “Research for Restoring Tropical Forest Ecosystems”, FORRU, 2006 & 2008).