Tonda

Tonda Wildlife Management Area was established in 1975 in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea, next to the border with Indonesia, and at some 5,900 km² it is the country's largest protected area. It was designated a Ramsar site in 1993.

It adjoins Wasur National Park in Indonesian Papua, with which it forms a cross-border protected block covering the same system of savannahs and seasonal wetlands on the southern plain of New Guinea. As there, the landscape alternates between monsoon flooding and drought, and that swing concentrates wildlife in the residual pools during the dry season.

Its fauna is Australian in affinity, because New Guinea shares a continental shelf with Australia: agile wallabies, cassowaries, magpie geese, black-necked storks and an abundant waterbird fauna. The Wildlife Management Area designation is characteristic of Papua New Guinea and singular in the international context: the land remains the customary property of the clans, who are the ones who decide and enforce the rules of use through a committee, with no expropriation and no direct state management. That model, heavily dependent on community cohesion, is at once its strength and its fragility.