Our project at Panadura (in home gardens) and Waga (in home gardens, rubber plantations and forest) promotes conservation of Semnopithecus vetulus nestor, the western purple-faced langur (WPFL): an endemic Critically Endangered monkey, restricted to the biologically rich western wet lowlands of Sri Lanka. It is listed among the 25 most threatened primates in the world, due to the rapid loss of tree cover in village gardens—its main habitat, compounded by the lack of sizable forests in its range due to historic reasons. The only hope for this langur is to restore, enrich, buffer, and link its small forest habitats to form viable small forest systems as “ecological networks” using a “a landscape approach”. This needs active management of its small, degraded and fragmented (but biodiversity rich) forests that are buffered and linked via village home gardens and rubber plantations, with the active participation of local communities.

Our project at Waga is carried out in and around the Indikada Mukalana Forest (IMF), to be linked to the Labugama Kalatuwawa forest, is one of the last remaining patches of rainforest in the Colombo district. It is also the last major forest refuge for the WPFL. The project seeks to provide a model for conservation of an Endangered monkey and its degraded habitats with the participation of local people, but using an innovative multifaceted approach that includes research, forest restoration, minimising human-monkey conflict, local livelihood development, and re-branding nature-based tourism, supported by strategic use of education and communication. It seeks to pilot test conditional socio-economic upliftment of local communities, in lieu of their help to buffer, enrich, and link small rainforest fragments in their village gardens (food forest gardens), with the support of private and public sector partners. The project provides the research base to learn more about the WPFL in varied habitats and to test forest restoration and enrichment with the engagement of local people and forest managers and has already supported a research assistant to obtain an M. Phil degree on “Study of Feeding behaviour and range use in ecology of forest living Semnopithecus vetulus nestor within the Indikada Mukalana Forest.”