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The Yunnan Golden Monkey Conservation Program
Striving to Protect One of China’s National Treasures

Yunnan golden monkey
Yunnan golden monkey
© Long Yongcheng/TNC

The Yunnan golden monkey, also known as the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, lives at the highest altitude (over 10,000 feet) of any primate, and is one of the most endangered animals on earth, with only 1,500 individuals living in the wild in fragmented populations. The Nature Conservancy is working to develop an innovative range-wide conservation plan that expands the scope of monkey conservation efforts from the current site-by-site perspective to include the Yunling Mountains of Yunnan and adjacent Tibet. Our goal is to create a legacy of institutions, projects, and information that will result in interconnected populations throughout Yunnan.

Threats
The Yunnan golden monkey faces a range of ongoing threats and the persisting effects of past disturbances, including habitat loss, human predation, and the biological vulnerability associated with having the entire species occur in eleven small, isolated populations.

Goals
The Conservancy created the Yunnan Golden Monkey Conservation Program to:

• build the long-term capacity of government agencies, institutes, and non-governmental organizations
• implement and monitor the conservation plan
• build upon this plan with new resources in a dynamic, adaptive management framework

What the Conservancy is Doing
Until recently, there was no coordinated conservation effort to identify and abate threats across the full range of the Yunnan golden monkey. The Conservancy recognized the need for coordination and has been active in monkey conservation ever since we began helping to establish Laojun Mountain as a nature reserve—home of two of the isolated monkey populations. By focusing on environmental education programs centered around the monkey we were able to teach entire villages about the value of their forest habitat

In an effort to fill important knowledge gaps of monkey biology, the Conservancy began tracking two monkeys with collared tracking devices in December 2003. This now enables the Conservancy and the Beijing Institute of Zoology to conduct long-term ecological and behavioral research on this endangered species. Filling these knowledge gaps will help us better understand the Yunnan golden monkey distribution and vulnerabilities to human threats, giving us better insight into creating effective conservation strategies.