Rainforest information in Thai

by Mongabay.com on 26 March 2011

Hornbill in Thailand’s Khao Yai National Park. Photo by Rhett A. Butler 2009

Mongabay.com, a leading forest conservation and environmental science news web site, today announced the availability of its rainforest site for children in Thai. The site is available at world.mongabay.com/thai.

The new site was made possible through the effort of Toangpos Srichanwoang, who translated the text from English into Thai.

Rhett Butler, mongabay.com’s founder, says he hopes the site will be used in Thailand to educate school children, as well as adults, about forests and the importance of protecting them. He believes the site could be a primer for ecotourism guides working in Thailand’s rainforest parks like Khao Yai.

Tropical forest covers roughly 37 percent of Thailand but natural forest has declined by more than 900,000 hectares, or nearly 6 percent, since 2000, according to data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Logging and conversion to industrial agriculture are major drivers of forest degradation and deforestation in Thailand. Primary forest, the most biodiverse form of forest, represents less than 20 percent of Thailand’s forest cover.

The addition of the Thai site means that Mongabay’s rainforest section for kids is now available in 37 languages—each of which has been translated by native speakers. Native speakers are presently working on a handful of other languages. An expanded version for adults is available in English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, French, German, and Japanese.

Mongabay.com is one of the Internet’s most popular destinations for information on tropical rainforests, drawing more than one million unique visitors per month, according to comScore.

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