Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Sumatra: Harapan - Memories and take-away thoughts

The Harapan Rainforest in the Indonesian province of Jambi, Sumatra is one of the few effectively protected areas in the lowlands of Sumatra. It is a former logging concession which has been leased for 99 years by the The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in collaboration with their Indonesian partner, Burung Indonesia. As part of the lease agreement, the area needs to be managed and re-vegetated by the RSPB. In the past Kew has helped to provide some of the botanical background for this project. The project’s primary purpose is to map the remaining vegetation of the project area and provide input and recommendations for restoration and carbon capture at the site.


Memories of the forest

In 14 days the Harapan Rainforest field teams:


95 km covered by foot
8 days boat access to remote sites
1 birthday party
187 old secondary forest plots
94 young secondary forest plots
11 very young secondary forest (thicket) plots
28 scrub plots
Five cleared plots

As well as getting a lot of field data recorded we also enjoyed our surroundings, the hospitality of the Harapan Rainforest team, and life in the forest.



My fond memories of fungi


In the field I particularly loved the broad range of fungi found throughout Harapan Rainforest. From super tiny (the thickness of a hair) to large carpets. All shapes and sizes...

Fungi in Harapan Rainforest

Interesting Botany bits from Marie


For me an excellent by-product of the trip was visiting enough sites to be able to see a pattern evolving regarding the species associated with the different types of vegetation. 

For example swamp forests (Pandanus spp. Barringtonia sp., the big Anacardiaceae with the poisonous sap which is clear then turns jet black on exposure to air – Gluta renghas L.-this was also one of the Anacards which reacts with skin and blisters the skin badly – I was really excited to see it as it was a massive tree and hadn’t been cut, presumably because the wood & sap is so poisonous).

Gluta renghas L. - Left: cut,  Right: bleeding

I also enjoyed the different types of Macaranga associated with sites of regenerating vegetation.Macaranga gigantea for example, was very clearly a secondary vegetation plant. Many of these species are now committed to memory as we spent so much time looking at them as we traveled backwards and forwards up and down the river each day visiting different sites.
We also encountered an interesting member of the Rubiaceae (coffee) family - at first I thought it was a strangler fig because of its latticed trunk – in the older specimens you could see right through the stem to the other side. It was a massive tree and too high for us to collect from.

Pertusadina eurhyncha (Miq.) Ridsdale

We looked through binoculars and managed to find some of the inflorescences (flowers) and leaves on the forest floor. We thought it might be Rubiaceae but no one had come across one like this before. Back in the Herbarium at Kew I was able to identify it as a Pertusadina eurhyncha(Miq.) Ridsdale. There were some very large tree specimens of this species found at different sites so it was very satisfying to be able to put a name on it and, as Pak Deden said when I told him about it: 'It's very good if you identified the tree, because it’s rather common in this area. The tree is very important, because it has a big trunk and a good canopy.'


The final collection of our trip for our team was a specimen from the Sapindaceae family – a wild lychee or rambutan type thing with the most delicious fruits which were a combination of lovely juicy lychees and blackcurrant sweeties! Specimens were made for the herbarium but we got to eat the left over fruits.


Sapindaceae family


Life in the Harapan Rainforest


The Harapan Rainforest team made us feel really welcome, they worked hard and were a lot of fun in the field. We couldn’t have collected as much data as we did without everyone’s expertise and enthusiasm.

Our Indonesian counterparts were very good company and watchful for our safety. There were so many slippery fallen trunks to cross and small streams to jump in the forest, that there were constant calls of 'hati hati' ('be careful' in Indonesian). Repetition really is the way to learn a different language because if you hear it enough you will learn it.


It was also very kind of the team down at Bato to turn the field office into a room for us ladies too – they provided us with mattresses and it was a comfortable place to lay our heads after a hard day’s work in the field and was quite, ahem, ‘homely’ (messy) after we got our mosquito nets set up and emptied the contents of our bags out.    

All in all we came away with many happy memories and friends, as well as very useful data!

Field Team at Bato Camp Harapan Rainforest




Something that makes me laugh still from the camping trip – Jenny and I sharing a tiny tent on the hottest night ever – the tents just weren’t designed for that, in the tropics – there was absolutely no air flow through the tent and we about died (slight exaggeration but it was very very hot). Funnily enough it was the best night’s sleep I had had up to the point and the first night I felt that I had caught up on some sleep – think it must have been heat induced coma! The next night in the tents was blooming freezing (probably only dropped to 22 degrees or something but seemed cold).


Kew team celebrate the end of the field work with avocado shakes

   

-jenny and marie briggs (Botanist, KEW) -

Monday, 2 July 2012

Sumatra: Harapan Rainforest – Kew Magazine

Kew Magazine Summer 2012 has written a nice summary article on our field work and research in Harapan.

Seeing the wood for the trees


Sunday, 12 February 2012

Sumatra: Amazing Island

An amazing place with a lot of everything:
Flora, Fauna, Scenery (land and sea)

Charasmatic elephants
Cheeky orangutans (the really orange ones)
Lush forests
Smoking volcanoes
Amazing underwater scenery
More moray eels that I have ever seen
Gorgeous beaches
Wild rivers
Friendly people
Fungal diversity


Lush forests

Cheeky orangutans (the really orange ones)

Charasmatic elephants

Smoking volcanoes

Wild rivers

Fungal diversity

Gorgeous beaches

Amazing underwater scenery
More moray eels than I have ever seen

Friendly people

Saturday, 4 February 2012

Sumatra: Harapan Rainforest – Mapping how we did it



We have done a lot of work collecting data in the Harapan Rainforest. In this blog we have an overview on how all that data is used to produce a vegetation map.
Our focus in Harapan Rainforest was to summarize the condition of the forest. Satellite imagery (from the French satellite SPOT) from 2009 was used to generate a very basic classified image. This imagery was three years old, but it was the most recent high resolution image available of the entire Harapan Rainforest boundary with little cloud cover we could find (it is very wet and cloud there).


In this map the darker the red the more developed the forest 
(or at least that is the theory we want to test).

In general we view forest in shades of red, a false colour composite (FCC). This is where the images colours are shifted to allow use to use near infra-red.  Healthy vegetation will reflect the near infra red (making it looking red in the resultant image). The naked eye can discriminate more shades of red than any other colour.








Red-Green-Blue image display colour corresponds to 3-Green, 2-Red, 1-Near-Infrared bands.
Red shades: Vegetation
Cyan shades: Low vegetation/ clearings
White/black: No data due to cloud/ cloud shadows



A quick classification of the SPOT imagery gave us an indication of differences we might be able to identify on the ground within the forest. We were not entirely sure what those differences were and that was why we need to see them on the ground.



Colours were associated with ‘best guess’ vegetation classes
 (without any ground-truth data). Good forest in red tones,
 younger forest blues and or disturbed areas into the greens.

In the forest we used pre-prepared image analysis maps (such as the classification map above) to guide our daily route of ‘plots’ through the forest. We were looking at the different blocks of colour as an indication of different forest cover levels. We also looked at changes between 2009 and 2011, which would indicate re-growth or loss. 
  

We loaded these images on to android smart phones (we used the Samsung Galaxy S2 and Samsung Galaxy Note devices, in the field)  to view, interact and set interest points using Locus Pro.




At each plot we collected data:
           location coordinates
environment e.g. hill
   slope, swamp etc.
percentage forest cover
size of trees
dominant tree species
dominant understory
   vegetation
 



All the information we gathered in the field was entered into  digital forms (ODK collect) on the smart phones.


We periodically sent data up to the server when we had WiFi connection back a base camp. Back in Kew the data was collated and published on the GIS Unit Expedition Maps webpage. Geotagged tweets as well as our ODK datasheets were mapped in near-real-time.


Roki records tree size and species for large trees in the plot


It was a very successful field campaign with over 300 plots surveyed with detailed canopy measurements and environmental variables with associated geo-locations, photographs and videos.

Back in the office at Kew we cleaned up the data, filled-in blanks and attached photos taken with our own cameras. The field data was broken into thirds. One third was used to train the satellite imagery into defined forest categories and the last two-thirds to test the classification.

The forest categories we used were: Old Secondary Forest / Disturbed, Young Secondary Forest / Disturbed, Very Young Secondary Forest (Thicket / Disturbed), Scrub, Cleared. After a few iterations a base map was produced for the area. Our results show that all forest levels showed good potential for regeneration from species identified in the field. There was a lot more intact forest than we suspected from our initial work with the satellite imagery. See some of the results from the map.




We are finishing up on this phase of the project, but we are still updating our online expedition maps with geo-located photographs.

Links:
Main page for Harapan:
Collections map:
Vegetation map
Blogs: