Restoring Fire-Degraded Habitats in Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary

The Small Mammal Conservation Organization emerged from an urgent need to protect the endangered Short-tailed Roundleaf bat from wildfires. This species was thought to be extinct until it was re-discovered in Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. We held town hall meetings with communities living around this sanctuary, and realized that wildfires were not only destroying critical species' habitat but were also affecting livelihoods of the local people. These wildfires originating from small-holder farms would burn for days, destroying large sections of forest and creating gateways for invasive species encroachment, degrading vital habitat and weakening the ecosystem that local communities and nature depend on. To stop the wildfire threat, we co-designed an early-warning wildfire prevention program with the local communities. 

While this program has successfully prevented wildfires, it revealed a new challenge: previously fire-degraded areas are being lost to farm encroachment and invasive species. Without active intervention, these forests may never  recover. To address this gap, we are working with local community women, called the Kujo women, to deploy an ecological restoration program that aims to plant 10,000 native seedlings in fire-degraded patches of the sanctuary by 2030. This assisted regeneration effort combines native species planting with community-led stewardship to speed up natural recovery, forestalling smallholder farm encroachment and replacing invasive species-dominated patches with native trees that sustain biodiversity and restore ecosystem health while ensuring that local people remain central to the long-term protection of the forest.

The main barrier we face is a limited capacity to scale our restoration efforts from pilot scale to landscape-level. This is mainly constrained by the lack of a central screenhouse to support consistent, large-scale seedling production and deployment. Currently, this limits how many degraded sites we are able to restore each year and slows progress toward our long-term targets. 

This funding will enable us to build and establish a central screenhouse, including a network of community-managed nurseries capable of producing an estimated 10,000 native tree seedlings annually. This will ensure a reliable, year-round supply of high-quality seedlings, and more efficient coordination of our restoration activities.

The establishment of this central screenhouse with its increased capacity will allow us to move beyond small-scale restoration to achieve our long term goal of sustained, measurable recovery of degraded forest areas, which will in turn strengthen the long-term ecosystem resilience across the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary.