Willie Smits

Quick Facts

Full Name	Willie Smits
Occupation	Forestry Scientist
Date Of Birth	Feb 22, 1957(1957-02-22)
Age	67
Birthplace	Weert
Country	Netherlands
Birth City	Limburg
Horoscope	Aquarius

Willie Smits Biography

Willie Smits is one of the most popular and richest Forestry Scientist who was born on February 22, 1957 in Weert, Limburg, Netherlands. Willie Smits (born February 22 1957 at Weurt, Gelderland, the Netherlands) is a certified forester, microbiologist animal rights activist, conservationist as well as a wilderness engineer and social entrepreneurs. He has been within Indonesia from 1985, and has been an Indonesian citizen. He has been tied to Adrienne C. Watson since March 2016.

In 1991, Smits established the organization that would soon be known as known as the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS) located situated in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) the largest organization to protect the threatened Bornean orangutans. Two years prior, Smits had had his first encounter with an orangutan on the market. It was an unforgettable experience and Smits frequently retells the tale:

Smits received the first non-Indonesian Satya Lencana Pembangunan Award (1998). He has the equivalent of a knighthood from the Netherlands for his conservation work, and was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2009.

In 2001, BOS started purchasing land near Wanariset (1°2′44″S 116°59′15″E  /  1.04556°S 116.98750°E  / -1.04556; 116.98750 ). The 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres) area it acquired had been deforested by mechanical logging, drought and severe fires and was covered in alang-alang grass (Imperata cylindrica). The aim was to restore the rainforest and provide a safe haven for rehabilitated orangutans while at the same time providing a source of income for local people. The name Samboja Lestari roughly translates as the “everlasting conservation of Samboja”. Wilderness engineering in the form of reforestation and rehabilitation is the core of the project, with hundreds of indigenous species planted. By the middle of 2006 more than 740 different tree species had been planted.

As an forest researcher working in East Kalimantan, Indonesia in 1989, Smits came across an orangutan baby inside a cage at an open market. Later, he returned to discover the animal abandoned on a garbage pile. This was the turning point in his life. Taking the orangutan to its home to care for it, he nursed it back to good health. The orangutans were soon added to the orangutans for care and his work of rescuing, rehabilitation and releasing orangutans to the wild evolved into what would become known as the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. Since the age of twenty, Smits has worked to ensure to save this endangered species of ape. During the course of his work, it has expanded into relevant areas of sustainable agriculture as well as remotely monitoring forests. He has travelled extensively, bringing awareness of the problems surrounding the destruction of forests within Borneo and the deplorable situation of the orangutan. He is as well as demonstrating that it is feasible on a tiny scale to stop the enormous damage caused to the orangutan as well as its habitat. He was made an expert advisor for the Ministry of Forests in Indonesia and was knighted in the Netherlands.

Willie Smits Net Worth

Willie Smits is one of the richest Forestry Scientist from Netherlands. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Willie Smits 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

In the year 1980 the year 1980, in the year 1980, when Smits made a proposal to his former wife on Tomohon, North Sulawesi, Smits was astonished by the amount of dowry: Six sugar palms. At the time the sugar palm that was ripe for harvest costs about the same as chicken. However, the inhabitants of Tomohon were in favor of sugar palms (“pohon aren’t”) rather than gold for their wedding dowry. “I wondered why it was that cheap,” Smits states. He later found out the reason and referred to the sugar palm as an “magic tree”. He declares about that sugar palm. “From the roots to the leaves, every bit is beneficial for people. Those who eat palm sugar will live longer than those who use cane sugar.” Through his research within North Sulawesi and other places in Indonesia in which sugar palms flourish He has discovered that many people do not make use of the tree and its advantages.

From 1985 to the present, Smits was working at his position at the Wanariset Tropical Forest Research Station close to Balikpapan located in Indonesia’s Indonesian region in East Kalimantan. In the beginning of the 1990s, he was the team leader of the Tropenbos Kalimantan Project Indonesia, an international partnership that was formed between Tropenbos Foundation and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry and Tropenbos Foundation.

In 1994, Willie Smits received his doctorate in tropical forestry and soil science at the Wageningen University in The Netherlands, based upon his research in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, Indonesia on the symbiosis between mycorrhizas and the roots of Dipterocarpaceae tropical rainforest trees.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

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Who is Willie Smits Dating?

According to our records, Willie Smits is possibily single & has not been previously engaged. As of December 1, 2023, Willie Smits’s is not dating anyone.

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Smits is one of the founders of, and the chairman of the Masarang Foundation, which raises money and awareness to restore habitat forests around the world and to empower local people. In 2007, Masarang opened a palm sugar factory that uses thermal energy to turn the juice tapped daily from sugar palms (Arenga pinnata) into sugar or ethanol, returning cash and power to the community in the attempt to move toward a better future for the people, forest, and native orangutans, while saving 200,000 trees per year from being cut down as fuel wood.

Facts & Trivia

Willie Ranked on the list of most popular Forestry Scientist. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in Netherlands. Willie Smits celebrates birthday on February 22 of every year.

In 2018, Smits was noted in the book Rescuing Ladybugs by author and animal advocate Jennifer Skiff. According to Skiff, Smits has facilitated as of 2018 the rescue of 1300 orangutans, has established 114 conservation projects in Indonesia, including “setting up sanctuaries in twenty-eight locations throughout the country”.

What did Willie Smits do?

Smits designed the Schmutzer Primate Centre at the Ragunan Zoo which opened in 2002 so that the orangutans have freedom and privacy in a habitat with a variety of forest trees and plants, a waterfall and water with turtles and fish, and small animals like porcupines and deer mice.

What was Willie Smits goal?

Willie Smits, founder of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation and the Masarang Foundation, which raise money and awareness to restore habitat forests around the world.

Why does Smits think it important that the local people were included in

the planning and implementing of restoring the forest?

Smits is convinced that the local community’s commitment to the forest will restore and protect its biodiversity in a way no government plan can. “Make villagers your partners, and nature will come back,” he says.

Why do countries engage in deforestation?

Direct causes of deforestation are agricultural expansion, wood extraction (e.g., logging or wood harvest for domestic fuel or charcoal), and infrastructure expansion such as road building and urbanization. Rarely is there a single direct cause for deforestation.

What has caused the pine beetle infestation?

Successive years of favourable summer and winter weather combined with an abundance of mature suitable pine hosts on the landscape have been cited as factors contributing to the massive epidemic that occurred in the 1990s and 2000s in British Columbia.