Effects of Logging, Plantation Conversion, Biomass Burning and Regrowth on Carbon Dynamics in Bornean Peat and Dipterocarp Forests: Implications for Global Carbon Cycle

Principal Investigators:

Simon Trigg, Lisa Curran (Yale), Alice McDonald (Yale), Dan Nepstad (WHRC), Richard Houghton (WHRC)

The tropical forests of Indonesia represent one of the most biologically diverse regions on Earth, as well as a significant terrestrial reservoir for atmospheric carbon. In Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), the dominant canopy and timber species are the Dipterocarpaceae. Dipterocarps employ a unique reproductive strategy in which inter-annual mast fruiting events are synchronized across large land masses, only in ENSO years. However, the ability of dipterocarps to reproduce, sustain vertebrate populations and sequester carbon has been disrupted by habitat fragmentation. The major causes of fragmentation and forest cover loss include illegal logging and conversion of primary forest to logging concessions and oil palm plantations. Forests that have been degraded by these processes have become more susceptible to drought and fire, accelerating forest degradation. The accelerating rate and extent of forest conversion and degradation necessitates local to regional scale investigations to both understand how changes and trajectories in land use and land cover alter human-ecological interactions, ecosystem processes and carbon dynamics, and to assist local governmental agencies and N GOs both to monitor and to discuss potential policy options

Focusing on Kalimantan, our research aims to: (1) develop a regional-scale database that can be used to quantify variations in terrestrial carbon storage as a function of forest cover and land use type, (2) apply new regionally-specific approaches to map the extent of peat forest, oil palm plantations and areas burned and assess the spatio-temporal patterns of degradation and land cover change. Results from the remote sensing analysis will be integrated with field data on parameters such as biomass damage, regrowth and fire vulnerability; the diverse data sets will then be incorporated into carbon models at scales ranging from processl evel to global.

Our partners include the Tropical Resources Institute at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Woods Hole Research Center. Collaborators include the University of Tanjungpura, Pontianak, West Kalimantan and the World Wide Fund for Nature, Indonesia and SIMPUR, a new Kalimantan NGO clearing house formed to enhance capacity and exchange of diverse data sets and products developed under this endeavor.

Example publications: Trigg, S. N., Curran, L. and McDonald, A. M., Testing the utility of Landsat 7 satellite data for continued monitoring of forest cover in protected areas of Southeast Asia. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (in press).