Cat Tien National Park is an important national park found in the south of Vietnam, around 150 km north of Ho Chi Minh City. It protects one of the largest areas of lowland tropical rainforests left in Vietnam.

History

Cat Tien national park was protected initially in 1978 as two sectors, Nam Cat Tien and Tay Cat Tien. Another sector, Cat Loc, was gazeted as a Rhinoceros Reserve in 1992 upon the discovery of a population of Javan Rhinoceros, an occasion that brought the park into the world's eye. The three areas were combined to form one park in 1998.

The park suffered historically during the Vietnam War when it was extensively sprayed with pesticides like the defoliant Agent Orange. To this day these areas have extensive bamboo and grassland cover and trees have not yet grown back.　

Biodiversity of Cat Tien

About 50% of Cat Tien National Park is evergreen forest, dominated by Dipterocarpaceae, 40% of the park comprises bamboo woodland, the remaining 10% is farmland, wetlands and grassland. The park fauna is impressive, if highly threatened, comprising of such impressive megafauna as Javan Rhinos (only one of two populations in the world), Asian Elephants, Gaur, Sun Bears and, possibly, Banteng, and wild Water Buffalo. Some accounts also list tigers, Leopards, Clouded Leopards, Dholes and Asiatic black bears, however a recent series of surveys did not confirm this. The park also holds hosts of smaller mammal species, including Yellow-cheeked Gibbons, Silvered Langurs, Crab-eating Macaques, Lesser Slow Loris, as well as civets, mouse deer, and treeshrews.

The park also has impressive bird species including White-winged Ducks, Siamese Firebacks, Great Hornbills and Black Eagles.

Threats to Cat Tien

Cat Tien comprises an important reserve in Vietnam, both for the habitat it protects and the species. As well as being a critical reserve for the Javan Rhino, it also is home to 40 IUCN Red List species, and protects around 30% of Vietnam's species. The park is, however, threatened by encroachment from local communities, illegal logging and poaching. In addition, the park is too small for the larger species found inside it, this leads to either their local extinction or to conflicts with local people as these animals move beyond the confines of the park. This problem is particularly intense for the park's elephant population, which is prone to wandering and is considered too small to be self sustainable.

Since the early 1990s, partly as a result of the discovery of rhinos in the park, international donors and the Vietnamese government began to invest more money in protecting the park and managing the resources of local State Forest Enterprises, nearby and adjoining forests, in synch with the park as a whole. There have been moves to combine a management plan that allows for both traditional park management and some limited resource utilization by local people. Source: Wikipedia