Replication of captive wildlife management software
- Technical staff of Ca Mau SDFP use CWFM to check the civet farm.
In Viet Nam, breeding and raising a wide range of wildlife species in captive wildlife facilities (CWFs) are common practices but little information on the captive wildlife population is available. Since 2014, the Vietnam Forestry of Administration (VNFOREST) has requested FAO to support improving legal documents and developing national database for better management of captive wildlife farming. A National database on captive wildlife management software (CWFM) has been developed and rolled out through 18 training courses for 455 VNFOREST staff in 2020 and 2021. In 2023, FAO will handover the CWFM to Vietnam CITES Management authority (CITES-MA) of the VNFOREST and support nationwide application through five trainings of trainer (TOT) and roll-out training for sub-departments of forestry protection (SDFP) in all 63 provinces.
From September to November 2022, FAO and CITES MA organized refresher training courses for four piloted SDFPs where the CWFM is used to provide update features, correct usage of data collection forms as well as collecting users’ feedback. A TOT course was organized in Khanh Hoa province to train resource trainers. In December 2022 and January 2023, six two-day roll-out trainings were organized with the resource trainers from SDFPs for district forest rangers.
With these recent training courses, 24 technical staff in 12 SDFPs were trained as resources trainers, 193 provincial and forest rangers were trained on data collection and data entry. At the end of 2022, the CWFM database has recorded data from 54 provinces and cities with 8,879 farming facilities and 2,085,515 animal individuals.
The CWFM database is shown to be an important, simple, and effective tool. It allows the sDFPs to easily provide accurate and timely updated information on CWFs distribution, type of animals, animal numbers, and protected groups. The information from the database can help identify production capacity and support the strategic development of market connections. The forest protection sector can use the data to enforce state regulations, improve the efficiency of registration and licensing management, and reduce fraudulent practices. The demographic information can can also be used to assess the risk of disease transmission among wildlife, between wildlife and livestock/human in wildlife breeding, raising and commercial trading sites, and support biosafety and biosecurity practices and regulations.