Our six-member team (made up primarily of undergraduate students from the University of Aberdeen and two team members from Indonesia) aim to work with the Talang Mamak people to increase their awareness of the situation. The aim of the Bukit Tigapuluh project is:

• To determine the local people’s perceptions and understanding of the importance of sustainable resource use and the conservation value of the National Park itself.
• To increase awareness of conservation and sustainable forest usage amongst local inhabitants through local participation, discussion classes in schools and village meetings.
  
• To research and compare the level of useful plant extraction from the forest by Talang Mamak communities living in the core and buffer zones of the park.
  
• To carry out surveys of the abundance of selected useful plant species in the core and buffer zones.
• Show the potential of non-wood products such as medicinal plants, fruits, nuts, resins, spices, and rattan to generate income without destroying the forest.

Further to this, we intend to:

• Compile a 'community resource book' for the Talang Mamak, which lists every plant species they use, to ensure that their knowledge is protected for future generations.
• Encourage continued research by other groups and universities.
• Assess how land encroachment, fragmentation and illegal logging have increased.
• Research medicinal plants and other non-timber plant species in order to allow conservation efforts to be focused on areas particularly at risk of over-exploitation.

Bukit Tigapuluh is a little studied National Park: the project will collect important data on the status of important useful plants in and around the Park, allowing conservation efforts to be focused on areas particularly at risk of over-exploitation and/or of unusually high diversity.

Local community inclusion is essential in conservation management and the information collected on the attitude of the inhabiting communities towards the conservation and sustainability will be very important in the development of community education programs.

As well as preserving Talang Mamak ethnobotanical knowledge and protecting them against infringement of their scientific property right, Community Resource Book compilation work will build a firm basis for future ethomedical studies and, by the creation of such a book, attention will hopefully be drawn away from the short term value of timber extraction to the sustainable and ultimately more profitable use of non-timber forest products.