Indonesia has extensive areas of post extraction secondary forests and degraded lands arising from intensive exploitation of forest resources in recent decades. Using the area of forests resulting from selective logging practices as an estimate, in year 2000, post extraction secondary forests covered about 23 million ha, or about 55% of the total concession area. This paper analyses the underlying causes of transformation of primary to secondary forests and degraded lands, including policy and regulations in forestry and forest resources, poor enforcement of regulations, and the lack of recognition of timber exploitation rights for local communities. The government is committed to promoting participation of local communities in managing forests. Recent policy changes for ameliorating some of the degrading factors have resulted in increased pressure on secondary forests due to rampant illegal logging and use claims by local communities and land speculators. While the largest proportion of post extraction secondary forests has been maintained as part of the permanent forest estate, substantial areas have been converted for swidden agriculture, industrial tree and estate crop plantations and transmigration areas. Local community involvement and an understanding of the underlying degradation pressures would be imperative for the effective rehabilitation and sustainable management of post extraction secondary forests.
CIFOR's research in the Bulungan Model Forest in Bulungan, East Kalimanatan took the form of a systematic investigation into ways of achieving forest sustainability in a large forest landscape with diverse, rapidly changing and often conflicting land-use demands. The integrated approach to research was applied to research on reduced impact logging, biodiversity of the area by using multidisciplinary methods across the landscape, forest people's dependency on forest products particularly on economic dependencies, and coordination and agreement in boundary negotiation among local communities, government and the private sectors. A brief report on the results of these researches is presented in this chapter.
This case study covers work in the Malinau catchment in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, a vast area of primary and secondary forest with scattered villages. The project has evolved to focus on key factors underlying poverty and forest loss. Inappropriate harvesting is reducing biodiversity, limiting regrowth of valuable species, and reducing water quality. The research aims to produce positive local impacts, while at the same time generating international public goods. Integration is achieved through a variety of annual and other meetings where multiple stakeholders, including especially local communities, gather to reflect on progress, and jointly plan for the next year. Conceptual models are used at such meetings to assist in building an integrated understanding of the inter-connected problems and opportunities. Participatory action research (PAR) is a feature of the work, allowing the research partnerships to rapidly adapt to fast-changing circumstances. The results have indicated the cost-effectiveness of reduced impact logging, but the difficulties of establishing and enforcing appropriate policies have proven to be the main factors limiting sustainable forest management. In the current phase of the work further effort will be given to spatial planning, in addition to capacity building of communities and district officials in this area. The research team has already contributed to the official land-use plan for the district, which incorporates some aspects of landscape management derived from the research.
This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this record ; The full author list is available in the online article at the DOI in this record ; Aim: Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) and in terms of responses to climate change. We quantified global patterns of tree palm relative abundance to help improve understanding of tropical forests and reduce uncertainty about these ecosystems under climate change. Location: Tropical and subtropical moist forests. Time period: Current. Major taxa studied: Palms (Arecaceae). Methods: We assembled a pantropical dataset of 2,548 forest plots (covering 1,191 ha) and quantified tree palm (i.e., ≥10 cm diameter at breast height) abundance relative to co-occurring non-palm trees. We compared the relative abundance of tree palms across biogeographical realms and tested for associations with palaeoclimate stability, current climate, edaphic conditions and metrics of forest structure. Results: On average, the relative abundance of tree palms was more than five times larger between Neotropical locations and other biogeographical realms. Tree palms were absent in most locations outside the Neotropics but present in >80% of Neotropical locations. The relative abundance of tree palms was more strongly associated with local conditions (e.g., higher mean annual precipitation, lower soil fertility, shallower water table and lower plot mean wood density) than metrics of long-term climate stability. Life-form diversity also influenced the patterns; palm assemblages outside the Neotropics comprise many non-tree (e.g., climbing) palms. Finally, we show that tree palms can influence estimates of above-ground biomass, but the magnitude and direction of the effect require additional work. Conclusions: Tree palms are not only quintessentially tropical, but they are also overwhelmingly Neotropical. Future work to understand the contributions of tree palms to biomass estimates and carbon cycling will be particularly crucial in Neotropical forests. ; Natur og Univers, Det Frie Forskningsråd ; European Union Horizon 2020 ; Brazilian National Research Council ; Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) ; Vetenskapsrådet ; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior ; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo ; Villum Fonden
Tropical forests are global centres of biodiversity and carbon storage. Many tropical countries aspire to protect forest to fulfil biodiversity and climate mitigation policy targets, but the conservation strategies needed to achieve these two functions depend critically on the tropical forest tree diversity-carbon storage relationship. Assessing this relationship is challenging due to the scarcity of inventories where carbon stocks in aboveground biomass and species identifications have been simultaneously and robustly quantified. Here, we compile a unique pan-tropical dataset of 360 plots located in structurally intact old-growth closed-canopy forest, surveyed using standardised methods, allowing a multi-scale evaluation of diversity-carbon relationships in tropical forests. Diversity-carbon relationships among all plots at 1 ha scale across the tropics are absent, and within continents are either weak (Asia) or absent (Amazonia, Africa). A weak positive relationship is detectable within 1 ha plots, indicating that diversity effects in tropical forests may be scale dependent. The absence of clear diversity-carbon relationships at scales relevant to conservation planning means that carbon-centred conservation strategies will inevitably miss many high diversity ecosystems. As tropical forests can have any combination of tree diversity and carbon stocks both require explicit consideration when optimising policies to manage tropical carbon and biodiversity. ; This paper is a product of the RAINFOR, AfriTRON and T-FORCES networks, for which we are hugely indebted to hundreds of institutions, field assistants and local communities across many countries that have hosted fieldwork. The three networks have been supported by a European Research Council (ERC) grant ("T-FORCES" - Tropical Forests in the Changing Earth System), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (283080, 'GEOCARBON'; 282664, 'AMAZALERT'), and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Urgency Grants and NERC Consortium Grants 'AMAZONICA' (NE/F005806/1) and 'TROBIT' (NE/D005590/1), 'BIO-RED' (NE/N012542/1) and a NERC New Investigators Grant, the Royal Society, the Centre for International Forestry (CIFOR) and Gabon's National Parks Agency (ANPN). Additional data were included from the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network, a collaboration between Conservation International, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society, and partly funded by these institutions, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and other donors. J.T. was supported by a NERC PhD Studentship with CASE sponsorship from UNEP-WCMC. R.J.W.B. is funded by a NERC research fellowship (grant ref: NE/I021160/1). S.L.L. was supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, ERC Advanced Grant (T-FORCES) and a Phillip Leverhulme Prize. O.L.P. is supported by an ERC Advanced Grant (T-FORCES) and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. L.F.B. was supported by a NERC studentship and RGS-IBG Henrietta Hutton Grant. We thank the National Council for Science and Technology Development of Brazil (CNPq) for support to Project Cerrado/Amazonia Transition (PELD/403725/2012-7), Project Phytogeography of Amazonia/Cerrado Transition (CNPq/PPBio/457602/2012-0) and Productivity Grant to B.S.M and B.H.M-J. Funding for plots in the Udzungwa Mountains (Tanzania) was obtained from the Leverhulme Trust under the Valuing the Arc project. We thank the ANPN (Gabon), WCS-Congo and WCS-DR Congo, Marien Ngouabi University and the University of Kisangani for logistical support in Africa, and the Tropenbos Kalimantan project (ITCI plots) and WWF (KUB plots) for providing data from Asia. This study is contribution number 706 to the Technical Series (TS) of the BDFFP – (INPA-STRI). For assistance with access to datasets we thank Adriana Prieto, Agustín Rudas, Alejandro Araujo-Murakami, Alexander G. Parada Gutierrez, Anand Roopsind, Atila Alves de Oliveira, Claudinei Oliveira dos Santos, C. E. Timothy Paine, David Neill, Eliana Jimenez-Rojas, Freddy Ramirez Arevalo, Hannsjoerg Woell, Iêda Leão do Amaral, Irina Mendoza Polo, Isau Huamantupa-Chuquimaco, Julien Engel, Kathryn Jeffery, Luzmila Arroyo, Michael D. Swaine, Nallaret Davila Cardozo, Natalino Silva, Nigel C. A. Pitman, Niro Higuchi, Raquel Thomas, Renske van Ek, Richard Condit, Rodolfo Vasquez Martinez, Timothy J. Killeen, Walter A. Palacios, Wendeson Castro. We thank Georgina Mace and Jon Lloyd for comments on the manuscript. We thank our deceased colleagues, Samuel Almeida, Kwaku Duah, Alwyn Gentry, and Sandra Patiño, for their invaluable contributions to this work and our wider understanding of tropical forest ecology.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1714977115/-/DCSupplemental. ; Knowledge about the biogeographic affinities of the world's tropical forests helps to better understand regional differences in forest structure, diversity, composition, and dynamics. Such understanding will enable anticipation of region-specific responses to global environmental change. Modern phylogenies, in combination with broad coverage of species inventory data, now allow for global biogeographic analyses that take species evolutionary distance into account. Here we present a classification of the world's tropical forests based on their phylogenetic similarity. We identify five principal floristic regions and their floristic relationships: (i) Indo-Pacific, (ii) Subtropical, (iii) African, (iv) American, and (v) Dry forests. Our results do not support the traditional neo- versus paleotropical forest division but instead separate the combined American and African forests from their Indo-Pacific counterparts. We also find indications for the existence of a global dry forest region, with representatives in America, Africa, Madagascar, and India. Additionally, a northern-hemisphere Subtropical forest region was identified with representatives in Asia and America, providing support for a link between Asian and American northern-hemisphere forests. ; European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement 660020, Instituto Bem Ambiental (IBAM), Myr Projetos Sustentáveis, IEF, and CNPq, CAPES FAPEMIG, German Research Foundation (DFG; Grants CRC 552, CU127/3-1, HO 3296/2-2, HO3296/4-1, and RU 816), UNAM-PAPIIT IN218416 and Semarnat-CONACYT 128136, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnoloógico (CNPq, Brazil), Fundação Grupo Boticário de Proteção à Natureza/Brazil, PAPIIT-DGAPA-UNAM (Project IN-204215), National Geographic Society, National Foundation for Scientific and Technology Development Vietnam (Grant 106.11-2010.68), Operation Wallacea, and core funding for Crown Research Institutes from the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's Science and Innovation Group. ; Peer-reviewed ; Publisher Version
