Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) project scientific coordinator Dr Edgar Turner said that among the goals of the new project was to discover whether modified forests were capable of supporting biodiversity.
The central element of the SAFE project will be the creation of clusters of forest patches within an oil palm plantation, in addition to the establishment of research plots categorised into primary forest, logged forest, logged and fragmented forest in addition to oil palm plantation.
The fully integrated research programme will run for an initial period of 10 years and focus on six key areas:
- Animal diversity and communities (birds, mammals, invertebrates)
- Plant diversity and communities (diversity, growth rates and carbon sequestration, etc)
- Water and soils (including water quality, stream flows, erosion, water budgets)
- Carbon cycling (carbon storage in soils and plants, and sophisticated measurements of carbon dioxide fluctuations using a carbon flux tower)
- Nutrient cycling (nitrogen and phosphorus cycling, decomposition rates)
- Microclimate (including air and soil temperature, humidity)
Dr Turner explained that in order for researchers to understand how the ecosystem works, they must first attempt to gain a greater understanding of the linkages in an ecosystem and see how they affect one another as forests undergo changes and become fragmented.
“For example, a 24-hour sampling of temperature in an oil palm plantation shows that it has higher and more varied temperatures compared with a primary forest.
“This may be a problem to the communities living in a plantation. We want to examine how things like these affect the ecological stability in a particular research plot.”
