THE LOCAL COMMUNITY

The GHSNP area inclusive into two provinces (West Java and Banten), three districts (Bogor, Sukabumi, and Lebak) and devided in to 26 subdistricts which consists of 106 villages. There are 250.000 people live in and suround GHSNP area. In general, the local community who lives inside and surround the GHSNP area are the sundanese which is devided into traditional local community and non traditional local community. The distribution of the traditional local community historically focused at Urug Kampoong, Citorek, Bayah, Ciptamulya, Cicarucub, Cisungsang, Sirnaresmi, Ciptagelar, and Cisitu. The traditional local community have their own traditional informal separate from the government organizational structure.

Language that is commonly used by the local community is sundanese and majority of its people are moslem, although there are still some people embrace the old beliefs (sunda wiwitan). The traditional local communities in and around GHSNP are part of the national heritage. They are still firmly hold their ancestor's customs cultural in their daily life style, architecture of their houses, the agricultural system, and their interaction with the forest.

The daily lives of the local community depends on traditional agricultural system. Generally, the community used the land and forest in various ways, such as swidden cultivation (huma/ladang), rice fields (sawah), garden (kebun), mixed garden (kebun talun), and mixed forest (talun). The agricultural main product from the traditional local community is local rice and usually as the act of gratitude towards the rice harvest, they celebrate the harvest party of seren taun. 

The traditional local community used and protect the forest based on hereditary concept such as 'leuweung titipan' (protected forest), 'leuweung tutupan' (conservation forest), and 'leuweung sampalan/bukaan' (open forest). They still have a strong interaction with the forest. They also have an ethnobotanical knowledge and used the plants around them. They know more than 400 species and categorized it based on its utilization such as building material, firewoods, agricultural material and equipment, medicines, food, and etc.