Qualla: Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary

Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit You Delux, Public domain. In the Kuy language, prey lang means the forest that belongs to all of us. That is not a slogan applied later by conservationists; it is simply what the people living at its edges have long called the place, and there is an argument folded inside the name about who a forest is for. Prey Lang spreads across roughly 3,600 square kilometers of northern Cambodia, touching four provinces at once, and it is the largest surviving lowland evergreen forest on the Indochinese peninsula. That superlative is worth sitting with. It means that nearly everything comparable, everywhere else on the peninsula, has already been cut.

Image: You Delux | Public domain

Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary: Four Provinces, One Canopy

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prey Lang Community Network, CC BY 2.5. Protection came late and came on paper first. Sub-decree No. 74, signed on 9 May 2016, established the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary over 431,683 hectares reaching into Kampong Thom, Preah Vihear, Kratie and Stung Treng. What the boundary encloses is the flat, humid, tall-canopied...

Image: Prey Lang Community Network | CC BY 2.5

Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary: The Iron Kuy

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prey Lang Community Network, CC BY 2.5. Most of the people in those surrounding districts are Kuy, an Indigenous group whose language belongs to the Katuic branch of the Austroasiatic family, alongside Bru and Ta-Oi. The 2019 census counted 70,302 Kuy in Cambodia, and only about a quarter of them reported fluency in th...

Image: Prey Lang Community Network | CC BY 2.5

Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary: Patrols with Smartphones

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cleoramx1, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2007, nine years before the sanctuary legally existed, Kuy communities formed the Prey Lang Community Network to defend the forest themselves. Members walk it. They georeference stumps, photograph felled trunks and poaching camps, record forest condition, and upload the result...

Image: Cleoramx1 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary: Trees Marked in Red

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prey Lang Community Network, CC BY 2.5. The patrols keep finding the same thing. Over July and August 2019, the Cambodian Youth Network covered 1,761 hectares in Stung Treng and Preah Vihear and reported several hundred hectares of dense evergreen forest already cleared, along with hundreds of trees marked in red paint...

Image: Prey Lang Community Network | CC BY 2.5

Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary: The Carbon Arithmetic

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prey Lang Community Network, CC BY 2.5. Prey Lang has also acquired a second identity as a climate asset. The northern part of the landscape became an operational REDD+ project in 2018 under Japan's Joint Crediting Mechanism, implemented jointly by Conservation International's Cambodia programme, Cambodia's Ministry of...

Image: Prey Lang Community Network | CC BY 2.5