Abstract 130 – Introducing the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Research Project

Laura Saunders and Siew Te Wong

The Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre (BSBCC) located in Sabah, Malaysia operates
through five pillars: animal welfare, rehabilitation, education and outreach, ecotourism and
research. Although the centre offers optimal settings for research across multiple disciplines, it
has not yet been utilised. The Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Research Project aims to create
and deploy research projects across the remaining four pillars of BSBCC, to encapsulate
important social and behavioural information and to inform on-going conservation action of
sun bears in sabah. We aim for this project to be sustainable and include the centre's own staff
members who will plan, participate and conduct research practices, as a step towards
recognising ground researchers in research and authorship. Social research will look to
understand local Sabahan perceptions and folklore of sun bears which may advise future
education and outreach programmes. In addition, tourist perceptions of sun bears will be
examined across nationalities and may support future development of this and other eco-
tourism centres. Behavioural research will look to monitor the long-term progress of bears
across both the hard and soft rehabilitation methods, collaborating with the Tabin Sun Bear
Project, and will consider the role of personality, rescue background and human orientation to
observe such progress. Implications from such background research could help inform which
ages and years of undergoing rehabilitation may be optimal for successful soft releases. In
addition there will be behavioural research looking into captive bear feeding patterns,
enclosure utilisation and stereotypical behaviour, which will support the welfare maintenance
of non-releasable bears. Overall, the project aims to collect data across multiple disciplines to
gather enough information about Bornean sun bears to inform future conservation action
decisions in Sabah, Malaysia.