More good news from April is that logging within the The SAFE Project area has begun.  The Usahawan Borneo Group began logging in early April and are now working in fifteen to twenty blocks, depending on the availability of tractors and operators.  They are currently taking trees with a DBH of 35cm or above from the southern parts of the project area, with our E Block fragments and 15m stream riparian zones being the first areas to be created.  The second round of logging will target trees of a DBH of 18cm above and will begin once the veneer sawmill is ready.  Once these larger trees have been taken, Benta Wawasan the terracing subcontractor, will begin clearing the remaining vegetation and prepare the estate for oil palm.       

New camp

With the onset of logging around our 'temporary camp', we have been forced to move to a more suitable site.  It was a sad day when after three years the SAFE crew, which has grown from a family of about ten to a family of over forty (including three actual families!!), said goodbye to our little camp by the 0m river and moved to a brand new and even bigger temp camp by the LFE river.  The good news is that we are now situated near the site for the proposed field centre and so the next move should be much easier.  Building on the Field Centre is set to begin within the next month or so with the hope that we will be fully installed within a year.   

Back after a five month hiatus back in Oxford and Finland, Oxford Post-Doc Dr Terhi Riutta, returned to SAFE in April after attending the Developing Sustainable Tropical Landscapes  Conference in Kota Kinabalu.  Terhi is one of our core researchers and runs the two Carbon projects at SAFE.  She returned this time to conduct some repairs on some of the Flux Tower sensors and join her Carbon Team, Tien, Jef, Anthony, Mikha and Zinin, in monitoring the Carbon Plots and to carry out deadwood surveys. 

Terhi's primary project is the Carbon Flux Tower which measures the Carbon Dioxide and Water uptakes and emissions above the canopy, while weather stations at the top and bottom of the tower record temperature, air pressure, humidity, radiation, soil temperature and soil moisture.   For more details here.  She also runs our seven Carbon Plots, set up by Dr Toby Mathews, with her team of RAs, headed by Tien.  The Carbon Plots within the future fragment blocks will be used to monitor both the above and below ground carbon budget before, during and after the conversion period from Logged Forest to Oil Palm, while the plots located within the Continuous Logged Forest and Old Growth in Maliau will act as controls. More details here. 
 

Arriving in March this year for his second visit to SAFE, University of Florida's Ph.D. student, Rajeev Pillay, is back this time for a five-month stint!  Rajeev is researching the frugivore community at SAFE.  He is focussing on how forest cover affects seed dispersal; how frugivory and seed dispersal may be affected by fragmentation and isolation; and whether the existence of dispersers who are resilient to fragmentation will compensate for the loss of those who are more sensitive to environmental change. 

 

 

Using belt transects to sample the fruiting tree community within our plots, Rajeev and his main RAs, Magat, Zinin and Jef identified fruiting trees where he later placed infra-red video cameras to catch frugivores coming to feed on fallen fruits and seeds.  To supplement this data, he also occasionally heads out before dawn to conduct on-ground observations of frugivory at canopy level where possible.  Acoustic recorders are also being used to record the calls of the forest community and to identify the distinct calls of certain avian and arboreal mammalian frugivores to get a more general idea of the frugivore community. More details here.

 

After completing her Masters thesis on the abundance, diversity and co-occurrence of termites and ants along a habitat disturbance gradient within The SAFE Project area; Cambridge Ph.D student and now almost permanent resident of SAFE, Sarah Luke (or Sarah Sungai) is back, fresh from the Association for Tropical Biology & Conservation (ATBC) conference in Aceh. Switching terrestrial invertebrates for aquatic species, her Ph.D. research focuses on the diversity and function of stream macro-invertebrates and the effects of habitat conversion. 

Working mostly with Kiel, Sarah is sampling the adult dragon and damsel flies using butterfly nets; large macro-invertebrates using expertly made bottle traps from Blue Sky 1.5L water bottles (and only Blue Sky will do I am told!); as well as benthic insect larvae and surface skating insects with nets.  She is also collecting environmental data on the rivers, streams and their respective riparian forest zones to complement these findings. Sarah's preliminary findings seem to indicate that abundance and diversity within many invertebrate groups decline as forest quality declines and disturbance increases, and that there is a shift in dragonfly community composition as disturbance increases as well. For more information on Sarah's project click here.   

The River Man

As an almost monthly visitor to SAFE, Anand Nainar has been conducting research at SAFE since early 2011.  Recently converting his Masters degree at the University of Malaysia Sabah (UMS) into a Ph.D., Anand's thesis will outline the effects of riparian zones of different width on the sediment levels within water catchments.  

For the past two years he has been collecting baseline data with his main RA, Ling, on the discharge, suspended sediment, dissolved solids, and nutrients within nine SAFE Project streams as well as one in Danum Valley.  He is also noting any change in channel shape and size; very important data for an area like SAFE, which has such dynamic streams.  Over the next year or two, while the logging is being completed and the different sized riparian zones (from 0m to 120m) are created, Anand will collect the data, which will provide the bulk of his thesis.  More details here.