Steaming into Mayalibit Bay with Hengky and Alex, a mountain of food, and 400 L of gasoline for the next month.

Well, after two weeks of solving a neverending string of logistical, administrative, and social puzzles (too stressful and exhausting to recount here), we finally managed to set up a camp on the banks of the Kavlot River, near Kabilol. The village has been adamant that we involve as many people as possible in our enterprise, to share the work and wages, and so with 20 helpers we set off last Monday in three ‘longboats’ with our small mountain of food and equipment. The site we picked (the previous Saturday) is best accessed via a picturesque boat ride up the main Mantekit River draining the large watershed west of Kabilol, and then a very muddy slog across a soggy alluvial plain.

The Mantekit River trip is only about 45 minutes, through tall, intact mangrove swamp; then from a very narrow transitional Nypa palm section into a large area of sago palm swamp. The sago trees provide the majority of the starch for the residents of Kabilol, and we passed eight large palm-thatched huts on the river bank. This is where the villagers stay while they work a tree, cutting it just as it is about to flower (when the starch is being mobilized internally), grating the pith of the tree, and then washing the mashed pith through a fine mesh to capture a starchy meal. This energy-packed meal can be dried in blocks (“sago iris”), which are eaten dry or dunked in coffee as a portable snack (not my favorite; cardboard anyone?), or cooked wet with water to make papeda (see previous Seram blog entries). Our companions say they spend about a week every month working in the sago orchards.

The camp-building team from Kabilol village, with camp in background

After passing a sacred hill (where we had left offerings of cigarettes and betel nut on a prior reconnaissance trip), we landed on the south bank of the river and managed to load up everyone so that only one trip to the campsite was necessary. After a narrow disturbed zone near the sago trees, where some open gardens had been cut and some trees felled for local building needs, we entered tall, primary forest on a vast alluvial plain. This is the kind of forest that is always the first to go for agricultural needs: easy to access, with very fertile soils. We’ve been having a lot of rain, and drainage is poor on this large flat area; the water table is just inches below the surface in places, meaning that a column of feet soon becomes a trail of mud. Interspersed with these soggy areas are what must be slight domes of marginally higher ground that are more solid under foot and accumulate some leaf litter. The forest itself is tall, with a relatively low level of natural tree-fall disturbance, indicating that despite being wet, the soil provided good purchase for tree roots.

As ever, measuring the diameter of trees with tapering buttresses is always a challenge; Jamie and Samuel in action here!

The day-porters unloaded our supplies, and after a cup of tea and biscuits, headed back to the village. We had finally made it to a beautiful, if rather wet, parcel of lowland forest. On Tuesday, we set straight to work, laying out our 0.25-ha plots, measuring tree diameters and, for me, beginning to solve the sweet riddle of tree diversity: how many kinds, what are they, which species are new, and which “cool?” The methods match our previous trips to Borneo and Seram, so if you are interested you can look back at previous blog postings. I’m writing this from Waisai on Monday (June 10), where I have come out to meet four counterpart scientists who will be with us for the next week (more on them later). But in the first week at Kavlot we have already finished most of the work in two plots, so I am breathing a bit easier: we now have some Papua data!

As usual, the flora is wonderfully new and exciting, but I have to admit that it may be the birds that will make this site particularly memorable. I have never been anywhere where the birds were more “present”: loud and diverse from dawn to dusk. In Borneo around midday, the birdsong usually fades out, replaced by the raucous sawing of cicadas, but here at Kavlot there is no lull. The hornbills honk and swish overhead, and the red bird of paradise seems to always be calling (the villagers point it out). I’ve never really been a birdwatcher, and in fact usually see remarkably few birds given that I spend my days in the forest looking up into the trees, but I cannot help but want to know more about the birds here.

A finely crafted bird’s nest, just a metre off the ground, and with it’s own integrated rain cover.

We have a copy of the Birds of New Guinea (Beehler, B.M., T.K. Pratt, and D.A. Zimmerman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and I’m doing my best to identify what I see. For example, behind the camp a giant “kayu besi” (ironwood; Intsia palembanica) holds a large, noisy, and always present flock of what I make out to be metallic starlings. There is constant stream of parrots: white ones, black ones, and scarlet-plus-green-plus-red ones; I’m working on them! Frequently a pair of black-and-white ducks fly up the river, perching on high branches as they go. Most strange are the enormous round hillocks that one finds commonly in the forest, perhaps five meters in diameter and a meter tall. These are the nest-mounds of maleos: giant, decomposing compost heaps with raised internal temperatures suitable for incubating maleo eggs.

Waking up in this noisy forest is a treat, with sounds so different to ones I am used to in Borneo. Here’s a recording [mp3] made at about 5:30am (the loud popping sound is last night’s rain still dripping off the leaves; what sounds like regular, distant thunder is just Endro snoring in his hammock!). Now, in this dingy guesthouse in Waisai, just listening to this inviting symphony makes me eager to get back to the Kavlot camp.

Red bird-of-paradise displaying; (c) Tim Laman http://timlaman.com/

After last fall’s trip to Seram, our next sampling location is in Indonesia’s West Papua province, part of the great island of New Guinea. Even by rural Indonesian standards, Papua is remote and expensive to reach, but because of this contains the last vast areas of unexploited forest. It is the “final forest frontier,” and under active assault by timber, oil palm, ranching, and mining interests.

For our project, Papua represents the eastern-most species pool in the gradient we are studying from Asian to Australian forests. With the help of many local friends and collaborators, I managed to get permission from the Indonesian government to do research in Papua. Historically this has has been difficult to obtain, due to the persistent tension between ethnic Papuans still hoping for independence and the Indonesian state. I visited Papua in 2005, and it has been a dream to come back and do forest research here. There is a great gap in knowledge about the biodiversity of Papua, and very few forest plots with published data. We do know that the general composition of the lowland forests is primarily Asian in composition (i.e., still some dipterocarps, and still few eucalypts), but the details of local and regional variation in forest composition are very few. Based on the results of any collecting that has been done, there are a great many undescribed species in the forests, and we can almost certainly look forward to discovering some.

I’ve been in the westernmost city of Sorong for ten days now, reconnoitering travel, access, and logistics options. Due to my prior uncertainty about these options, I had obtained permission for two sites that would have worked for our scientific goals: the Tamrau Mountains in the north of the “bird’s head” of West Papua, and the large island of Waigeo, northwest of Sorong. On my previous trip, I fell in love with the nature of Waigeo. I also have strong personal connections with people I’ve met there before. On arriving in Sorong last week and meeting up with old friends, it became clear (as is always the case) that these personal connections count for much and make everything easier. Thus I have continued to pursue Waigeo as our destination.

While not too far from the Moluccan island of Halmahera, Waigeo appears to have a thoroughly Papua forest composition, probably due to its rapid motion from the east (in geological time) and very recent arrival in its current position. New Guinea is geologically complex, formed of the accretion of many parts, and both Waigeo and the Tamrau Mountains originated as micro-terranes in the mid Pacific. Waigeo appears to be loaded with endemic species, such as the rare red bird-of-paradise, Paradisea rubra, sought by Alfred Russel Wallace when he visit in September 1860 (see chapter 36 of his ‘The Malay Archipelago’). Botanically, Waigeo is very rich, due to the wide range of habitats and substrates, from limestone pinnacles to ultrabasic shrubland, from lowlands on volcanic soils to montane forest (on Gunung Danai, which we hope to visit). For information about the vegetation of the Raja Ampat, see a report [pdf] I wrote for the Nature Conservancy.

The past ten days have been full of the usual stresses of organizing an expedition: reporting to officials, (re-)obtaining permits for protected areas, arranging a later visit by my scientific counterparts, buying supplies, solving logistical issues to move and supply a team of ten for a month in the forest (planes, taxis, and lots of boats), dealing with the death of my BlackBerry, etc. I am sometimes tempted to think how much easier it would have been for Wallace: he just turned up, rented a shack not far from the shore and started work. But of course, I don’t (yet!) have to deal with constant threat of shipwreck, continual fevers, extended periods of very little food, and perhaps worst of all, being cut off from loved ones by vast distances with months separating written communications. I get to call home every day and stay (while in the city) in a pleasant air-conditioned hotel!

Hengky Goram and a giant Syzygium tree, Waigeo, 2005

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the vital importance of respecting and accommodating the desires and social concerns of local landowners. This is still true today for Papua more than in almost any other part of Indonesia. All land here is traditionally owned by local clans (“marga”), and recent constitutional changes will only strengthen the effective control people have over their land. This has impacted our trip already: I found out when I arrived that access rights for the area I had hoped to visit have been contracted out to an external party, albeit with the best intentions for forest conservation. This has led to some internal division within the clan. I was advised by local traditional leaders that, even though I had been welcomed to visit, my working in that area would likely fuel this internal conflict, probably with negative consequences for all parties. Instead, I was steered towards the village of Kabilol on the western shore of the amazing Mayalibat bay. I had also visited the forest here in 2005, and remember a beautiful, undisturbed lowland area, into which I was admitted as—in locals’ memory—the first foreign visitor.

So, this morning I leave by ‘longboat’ to cross the ocean to Waigeo. I am traveling with a local traditional leader, Pak Hengky, and tonight we will meet with the Kabilol village elders to ask about access to the the forest area to the west of their village. My trusty assistants, Endro and Acun, arrived on Monday and have been shopping up a storm ever since. They will take the public express foot ferry to Waisai, on the south coast of Waigeo, and then hopefully join me tomorrow in Kabilol. There is no cellphone signal in Kabilol, but we will be making regular trips to Waisai. Hopefully, I will be able to send new blog posts every now and again. Wish us luck!

The road that bisects the Manusela National Park in Seram

Being back home, I am struck yet again by the difference in remaining forest area and apparent current threat to the forest between Seram and Kalimantan. Sukadana is in many ways a frontier town: during the six years we have lived here, we have witnessed a relentless pushing back of the forest around this town as major local “development” has replaced trees with roads and buildings. During the 23 years I have been working in West Kalimantan, I have seen a wild, sparsely populated, forested region turn into a ragged matrix of agricultural monoculture, secondary forest, and new towns by logging, oil palm operations, small-scale slash-and-burn, and immigration. There is an ever-present feeling of a “war on the forest” in West Kalimantan. But I did not feel this in Seram. Most of the logging concessions there are now inactive, and their remaining forest (that I saw) not too badly degraded. The island’s major highway, cutting through national park and inactive logging concessions, shows no evidence of the ubiquitous small-scale timber operations that constantly push back Kalimantan’s forest boundaries.

In trying to understand this difference, and what it might teach us about conservation of the remaining forest, I am always reminded that deforestation results from a complex mixture of economic, political, geographical, biological, and cultural causes. But some reasons are more important than others, and perhaps the number one reason why deforestation in Kalimantan is far more advanced is biogeographical: the forests of Western Indonesia, and particularly Borneo, used to have very high densities of giant trees belong to the family Dipterocarpaceae, the meranti, luan, and keruing of timber trade. Up to ten trees per hectare could be harvested, with some trees containing ten cubic meters of usable timber in their trunks. The wood of many dipterocarps is almost grain-free and very easy to turn on giant industrial lathes into plywood sheets. Beginning in earnest in the sixties, the forests of Borneo were converted to cheap plywood, much of which was used for forming concrete and then discarded. The forests of Eastern Indonesia, while still containing a few dipterocarp species and other valuable timbers (especially merbau), have nowhere near the value for logging as the forests of Borneo had, and subsequently have been less impacted.

Borneo now is in a post-timber, oil palm phase, with the insufficiently regenerated logging concessions being re-classified as conversion forest for agriculture. International demand for palm oil is exploding, as an increasingly wealthy global population fries more of its food, and Indonesia is the world’s number one palm oil exporter. Oil palm is thus an important generator of foreign income and a lucrative business, although compared to liquidating thousand-year old trees, the investment needed is much higher and the initial returns much lower. Oil palm operations are spreading eastward throughout Indonesia, and much of the lowland forest on the giant island of Papua is now being converted (monitored by the important NGO “Sawit Watch“). I heard of several new palm oil operations in Seram, but it is possible that the seasonal climate of Seram results in relatively low palm oil productivity.

Land clearing by fire at Tanjung Gunung, West Kalimantan

To the extent that the actions of local residents (as opposed to corporations) also impact forests, the lower population in Seram, compared to our coastal strip of West Kalimantan, must surely be associated with lower pressure on the forest. Throughout Indonesia, indigenous populations have been augmented significantly by the process of transmigration, where Javanese and Balinese volunteer immigrants are offered land on the “outer islands” to develop and own. There are transmigrant sites in Seram (e.g., Unit ‘O’), but far fewer than in our area of West Kalimantan, and Seram feels like a sparsely populated place. One other likely reason for the Seram vs. Kalimantan deforestation difference is an ethno-biological one: the predominant starch of eastern Indonesia is sago palm (Metroxylon sagu), while in the west it is rice. Sago is a plant of forests, rice needs cleared land, and thus the search for basic sustenance itself leads to different impacts on the forest, and no doubt leads to different cultural relationships with the forest. In turn, different cultural and spiritual outlooks on forest could influence deforestation processes via choices communities must make (e.g., the decision by Masihulan not to accept offers of logging and oil palm on their land).

What can we take home from this cursory analysis of the trajectories of two forests? Perhaps the reminder that so much of the environmental change that has happened in the world is deterministic: geography, biology, and economics inexorably lead humans along certain paths. While individuals do have choices, the ones they can reasonably take are usually constrained by these larger deterministic realities. For me, being constantly aware of this provides a vital damper on my own emotional response to the steady loss of forest in Kalimantan.

Om Demi shooting down leaves with a catapult; one of the fig’s “trunks” is visible in the background.

The hard limestone weathers to a three-dimensional landscape of boulders and cliffs, and our plot included several caves. Straight lines are fundamentally incompatible with this place, and our initial survey of the 50-by-50 meter plot was a challenge. The canopy was high and unbroken, but felt thinner, or lighter than at the previous site. A giant, strangling fig stood in one corner, and I used it to impress upon Endro and Acun the vital importance of looking carefully at the leaves through binoculars and not just the leaves on the ground. The fig turned out to be two individuals of two different species, inseparably twined into one plant, with several “trunks” (actually roots for these hemi-epiphytic figs). As they looked more carefully, they saw two distinct leaf types, and noted that the bark “slash” on different trunks produced latex of different consistencies. I was using this plot as a training site; while Endro and Acun had been involved in collecting fallen leaves and making specimens at previous plots, they had not been directly responsible for the morphotyping (the discovery of how many distinct species are in a plot). I wanted them to become competent in this fundamental activity, for their own development and to expand their capabilities for times that I may be unable to accompany them in the field. They rose to the challenge, putting in the extra work in the afternoon and evening to sort the fallen leaf images on the computer into morphotype folders and update the database. Within three days, I was comfortable to leave them to to it. It gave me a great sense of accomplishment to have trained them over the past months and years to this level, and I know they feel greatly empowered by their skills and plant knowledge. We’ve talked often about ways in which they might be able to apply these rare skills in the future, developing careers as forestry and scientific consultants.

Fragrant flowers of tree E051, an alternate-leaved Apocynaceae, possibly Cerbera

It turned out that a much higher proportion of tree species were shared between this drought-prone Masihulan site and the flooded alluvial site at Toluarang than I expected; probably a product of the relatively low species diversity in Seram (and therefore possibly wider ecological niches) and a testament to the amazing plasticity of many plant species. Both the important pioneers Octomeles sumatrana and Duabanga moluccana were present, though the gorgeous, stately Eucalyptus deglupta was missing. The extremely common Canarium of Toluarang was replaced by another Canarium, one of the amazing species with turpentine-like sap so volatile that it will burn immediately when the flame from a lighter is brought close.

One of the pleasures of staying in the information center, apart from staying dry during the afternoon downpours, was enjoying the sight of the rushing stream across the road, in a steep ravine. The water has carved a series of bowls in the limestone, while the dissolved calcium carbonate has created smooth mounds of rock in the stream bed, like outdoor stalagmites. The water was cold and crystal clear, a shock to the system, but much more cleansing than the olive green, crocodile-filled river of our previous site.

PD, our gifted camp cook, kept turning out excellent meals during our stay. PD is himself from Masihulan and so was able to go home to church on Sunday. Masihulan is one of those rare places in Indonesia where eco-tourism, NGO work, and contact with students and scientific researchers seems to have contributed significantly to village income, and helped reinforce the existing pro-conservation outlook of many villagers. PD said the village had recently and unequivocally turned away both an oil palm concessionaire and a logging company: while the short-term financial gains of liquidating their forest resource would be substantial, the long-term availability of clean water, building materials, food, and their sense of identity as forest-loving people was far more important. It was clear from what PD said that the international knowledge of and respect for Masihulan and its people contributed to the community’s sense of self-worth. In optimistic moments, I can imagine a future where international respect touches down all over the globe, galvanizing forest peoples to take a long-term perspective in their choices. Of course, the prerequisites for such a future are limited: international knowledge of the back-waters of the world, travel funds, and, most seriously, national land-tenure arrangements that give the right of self-determination to forest peoples. But at least it is good to see it working somewhere. Go Masihulan!

I had come back down from Kaloa just in time to meet Acun, Yessi, Yahah, Nus and Demien (a park staff member assigned to our team) as they were setting out to join me in Ulu Sawe, so little of their time was wasted. Yessi Santika and Yayah Robiah are staff at the national herbarium in Cibinong, and have been helping with our project from its beginning. I was pleased they could join us for a couple weeks to help do some general collecting. It was Yayah’s first field trip (and also her first time out of Java and first air flight) and so I hoped it would go smoothly. As it turned out, it was almost certainly a much better experience for her at Toluarang than it would have been at the aborted Sawe camp.

It was clear that it was raining much less on the north coast than inland, and we set up camp and performed the usual minor forest engineering works required to make life reasonably pleasant. This included creating an enclosed bathing spot and river toilet for the women, steps down to the river, a cook tent (tarp), a dining tent, a lab tent, and a bunkhouse with rice-sack beds for the local assistants. Endro and I slept in our Hennessey Hammocks and Acun and the women slept in dome tents. All was quite nice, until we discovered that the forest here was full of chiggers (“kutu maleo”). Within a day or so, everyone was itching madly, or trying not to. Poor Endro and Demien were plagued the worst, probably exposed during a scouting trip to find a good camping spot on the first afternoon. For several nights I found one or both of them up past midnight in the lab tent in their underwear trying to dig out the mites with a needle. Somehow, I avoided a major infestation, and was able to sleep relatively soundly.

Collecting from the bridge over the Toluarang.

This was a forest site unlike any I have stayed in, since the road was just a few meters from the camp. For being the major island highway, there was surprisingly little traffic, but all day and night there was the occasional roar of a cargo truck or speeding passenger car zooming by. The bridge over the Toluarang soon became the favourite hang-out spot. High, dry, and chigger-free, it was a pleasant place to watch the bats in the evening’s fading light, or the stunning parrots and kingfishers in the dawn, or to do a little unsuccessful fishing. Under the bridge and parallel to the river, several unused construction logs made a slippery platform for bathing (and defecating) and tempted us to swim in the roiling, olive-green water after a hot day. However, crocodile eyes were spotted one night, and we later heard that not far upriver was a vast, flooded, grassy swamp densely infested by crocs. Little swimming ever took place!

The forest itself was truly spectacular: alluvial forest dominated by giant Canarium, Duabanga moluccana, and Octomeles sumatrana trees, huge tree-pandans (screwpines), and Caryota palms. Diversity was low, but we expected this in Seram: we found only 55 species in four 0.25-ha plots. One particular species, an ebony (Diospyros), was very common, representing over a quarter of all the stems. Knowing this forest had been chosen as a “model forest” by the park office and that there was no permanent plot here, I suggested to the head of the park, Pak Zul, that we set up a fully documented, one hectare (100 m x 100 m) plot for them. He was pleased and fully supportive, and I think it’s quite likely that the plot will be cared for and used as a training tool. In this way were able to add to the value of our project, meeting one of its capacity-building goals.

The collecting team in flooded forest on the last day.

Compared to the dense, high-diversity forest we encountered in Borneo, I was able to finish the initial morphotyping of this forest very rapidly. Collecting specimens might still have taken quite a while were it not for the amazing skills of Dedy and Ratu, our two tree climbers from Kaloa. They were up and down safely in seconds, allowing the collecting team to make and process up to fifteen tree species a day. We were thus planning to decamp as soon as today, but as ever, our plans were changed by the weather. Two nights ago there was a huge rainstorm over the camp. Because it was coastal, it need not have led to a rise in the river, and I watched the river level into the evening without noting any rise. However, it must have been raining in the interior as well, and starting at about 6:00am yesterday the river began rising.

By 8:00am, the water had reached the lip of the steep banks on which we had made our camp. It kept rising and soon the dining tent was inundated. Fortunately we could keep ahead of the rising water, but in the end we had to pack up the tents and move all the equipment onto the highway verge. I knew we only had twelve more collections to make, so I decided we would strike camp completely and hoped to get the specimens and be out by nightfall. The collecting team worked on in the flooded alluvial forest in water up to their thighs, while others dried the tents in the morning sun and started folding the whole show into backpacks and bags. I hitched a lift into Wahai to get a cellphone signal to call “Mr. La,” our friendly pickup truck driver, and was back in an hour, just as the afternoon rain was beginning to pelt down—the coast now too seems to be in the rainy season. Luckily, the collecting team had gathered all the taxa, and we finished the processing later that afternoon in Wahai.

Acun and Endro enjoying Acun’s fish on a rest day after several weeks of hard work.

So, despite the depressing retreat from Ulu Sawe, in the end we successfully sampled a lowland forest site while contributing meaningful infrastructure to the National Park. Yayah and Yessi also made a large number of excellent collections which will add significantly to the very low number of existing Seram collections. At the model forest site, there was no nearby high, dry, hill site to make direct comparisons with it; so tomorrow, we’re heading to a different section of the park, near Masihulan, to sample ridge forest. But today, all I can think about is how nice it is that the rain here in Wahai fell on a roof, and not directly on me or my tent. That and how good the fresh fish we had for lunch tasted. Ah, rest days!

A lot has happened since my last post. I went back up to “Unit O,” and hiked 100 km west to Kaloa with locals Agung, Jon, and PD (our cook from Masihulan). Since we had been planning to take a lot of the supplies in with us, I had lined up eight day porters the night before we set off. However, due to a series of misunderstandings about prices and expected duration of employment—combined with posturing and solidarity on their part and some misreading and mishandling of the situation on my part—the porters walked out on us after sharing a pre-trip breakfast. I was humbled by the experience, recognizing that despite my significant negotiation experience within some Indonesian cultures, I knew next to nothing about how to get things right out here in Eastern Indonesia. I was stressing about this on the walk in, though when we sat down for a rest the three locals who did come with me expressed their surprise and embarrassment at the rudeness of the missing porters.

We arrived back in Kaloa without rain, and I was again treated to the kindness of the people in this very small village. In the evening I met with two of the village elders (Mateas and Lukas) and discovered the tragic history of this community. Asking why it was so small (just 12 houses), they said it used to be huge, numbering more than a thousand people. The site of Kaloa was formerly on the other side of the Isal river, at the mouth of the Rara river which I had explored with Yustus a few days ago looking for a suitable research camp. However, at some time in the 1950s, a devastating epidemic passed through Kaloa. Most of the people died, often within just three days of getting sick. The original village site was abandoned and the survivors set up the tiny villages of Elemata and (new) Kaloa on the east side of the Isal. The pain of the death of old Kaloa was evident on the faces of the elders remembering that time. When I asked Lukas what he would like the rest of the world to know about Kaloa, he said, “its culture and traditions.” I asked more about this, and while they did describe a (now dying) tradition of basketry and rattan weaving, what Lukas seemed to be referring to was their culture of dance and song. He described village dances that went on for days, and songs of multi-part harmony. As so often happens out here, I was reminded that it is not just the biological diversity that rapidly is going extinct.

Agung and PD crossing the unpredictable, wide river Isal.

Yustus, Nus, Agung, PD and I set off the next day to find the perfect camp site. We crossed the Isal, no longer in flood, and cut through the tall alluvial forest to the Sawe River. I was aiming for a site about a two-hours hike up the gravelly river bed, where on our recce I had found low, rounded hills with Shorea selanica that would offer a nice ridge/valley contrast for our forest plots. However, during the previous evening’s discussion with Lukas and Mateas, I had described what I was looking for: rounded ridges, not slippery, unstable, knife-edge ridges, and they had pointed me towards the hill they called “Kehutupe.” I thought it important to explore this option, as I was still looking for sandy ridge tops that would cause significant drought stress for the trees in the dry season. Leaving our packs and the others by the Sawe, Yustus and I continued up the smaller Wehe river and got out on a long, narrow ridge of rattan palms. This was the traditional route cutting through to the Mual and Toluarang rivers to the west, but it did not look like anyone had come this way for a while.

Finally, after a discouraging half hour of slipping and being grabbed by the razor-sharp hooks of rattan, we climbed onto a wide, very flat plateau that seemed surprising in the context of its surrounding landscape. Clearly this was the remains of a level, sandstone sediment layer, and the soils looked acidic and humus-deep like those in similar situations in Borneo. Most amazingly, I spotted a seedling that rang a bell with me. Looking at the distinctive brown glands on the secondary nerves, I recognized a Vatica. I was extremely excited, since I’d just read in Edwards et al (1993; in The Ecology of Seram) that “the Moluccan endemic, Shorea selanica (“meranti”), is the only Dipterocarp species to occur in these lowland forests of north Seram.” Had I had found a significant new record expanding the distribution of dipterocarps? I also had a digital copy of Peter Ashton’s Flora Malesiana treatment for dipterocarps, and noted that Vatica ressak, the most likely candidate, occurs elsewhere in Maluku but was not listed as occurring in Seram. I’ll need to check this when I can access the internet, but for the moment it feels like a fun, albeit minor, discovery.

Returning to the others, we set off for the proposed campsite, another hour up the Sawe. As we arrived the rain started, but we found a suitable flat site high enough above the river to resist flooding. Within an hour we had hung a blue tarpaulin to shelter the bags, created a fire-pit, and a cleared area for my hammock. That evening, we were treated to the first of PD’s incredible meals. Hands down, he is the best field cook I have ever had the pleasure of working with, conjuring up from his magic bag of spices restaurant-quality sauces for fish (fresh and dried) and vegetables.

Our cook, ‘PD’ working his magic in front of our camp at Ulu Sawe.

Next morning, I set to work teaching Yustus and Agung how to lay out a 50 m x 50 m survey plot. They took to it rapidly, and soon Yustus was shooting dead-straight lines through tangled rattan and mud in what was to be the first of six plots: an alluvial forest site across the river from our camp. In the afternoon, I taught them how to label the trees with the aluminum tags they had helped make the previous night, and measure the trees with a forester’s diameter tape. After working with them in just a few 10 m x 10 m subplots, I was confident in their ability and started to work on identifying the trees and collecting fallen leaves, the fun part for me. Just then, the skies opened again and we rushed back to the camp in the strengthening rain. Within a half hour, the river had risen significantly, turning from a crystal clear brook into a brown torrent.

The storm passed by 6:00pm. As I retired to my hammock after dinner the stars were coming out. Next day dawned with blue skies behind a low mist, the trees still dripping from the previous day’s rain. Yustus and Agung continued on with the tree tagging, while I focused on the trees’ identifications:  the first tree was a Garcinia (its ultra-yellow sap the source of artists’ “gambouge” paint), then a Rubiaceae, an Artocarpus (locally “gomu”), an ebony, and so forth. I collect fallen leaves and/or shoot them out of the tree with a catapult, in order to keep track of how many “morphotypes” of plants are in the plot and hence determine which need to eventually be collected for DNA, wood, and botanical specimens. Most interesting was the dominance, both numerically and in terms of species, of the nutmeg family Myristicaceae, which becomes increasingly diverse as one travels eastwards in Indonesia. As a family, the trees are unmistakable with their red sap and distinctive nutmeg aroma.

Despite this, the overall composition of this alluvial forest was not strikingly different from one in Borneo, although it was clear the diversity was going to be less. Not for the first time on this trip, I was nagged by doubts about our standard disperalist model of forest formation in Eastern Indonesia:  that all the species have arrived independently via rare, long-distance dispersal events. How can it be that almost all the elements of a Bornean forest have come together in such a similar way on the other side of vast distances of empty water? Surely there must have been a land connection at some time. But that’s not what the geological story seems to say.

I had finished two rows, or 0.1 ha, by 1:00pm when it began to rain again. We went back to camp and had lunch as the rain picked up. Thunderclaps and twilight darkness signaled a major rainstorm. The river began to flood again and had risen a meter within just an hour of rain, becoming a terrifying brown force, sluicing down the valley bottom. Watching its deadly power, I made a decision that I had pondered for a while. I had been very troubled by the rivers, especially the deep, wide Isal, since we started exploring this region. I was sleeping poorly, plagued by what I had begun to call the “three-bee jeebees”:  waking too early from the sound of the frogs, the dripping forest, the river (quiet again by the dawn hours), and imagining team members being swept away or cut off for days from resupply by a swollen Isal.

So, despite the good campsite, the weeks already invested in this location, the promising forest, the “kehutupe” plateau, and some of my own pride, I decided to retreat and move to another site. Where that would be was not immediately clear, but clearly the safety of the team had to be paramount. If this had been a military operation, or even one formed solely of volunteers, we might have stuck it out. However, there was too high a risk of someone drowning (our three Javanese team members cannot swim), of getting cut off by the Isal without communication, or having team members trapped downstream on the Sawe and away from the campsite as night approached. Also at risk was the likelihood of wasting hours and hours each day in a damp, depressed huddle under the blue tarps, as the rain began earlier and earlier each day. After all, we were heading into the rainy season, not out of it!

Next morning, we packed up and headed back to Kaloa. As usual, the sky was blue and the river back to a crystal ribbon. I was tempted to doubt my decision, but the giant, building cumulus clouds, even at ten in the morning, assured me this was the right course. The problem was finding another site. In the park, the suitable area of non-limestone, rolling lowlands was bounded both to the east and west by rivers, the Isal and Toluarang respectively. Ironically and frustratingly, the hill behind Kaloa was a perfect site, even though much of it had been logged:  high, rounded ridges; well-drained soil; rivers full of hard sandstone boulders; and open, palm-free forest understories. However, this hill lies outside of the park, beyond the bounds of my research permit. It would have taken days and days of office visits, and no doubt would have involved snag after snag, trying to access this site with correct permission. In the end, I chose to set up a plot in the alluvial lowlands near the coast, easily accessible via the north coast road running through the park. I’ll pick up with this story next.

A flower from our first collection, xm-402, smells like honey.

Believe it or not, I managed to connect via sloooooow cell phone GPRS at 4:30 in the morning in Wahai, North Seram, and can send this report. I am just out of the forest after five days of trekking around, looking for a camp location. Tired (but this feels good) and wet, wet, wet. If there’s one thing I would change about this trip, it would be to have left a couple months earlier. Now, we’re just entering the beginning of the wet season, and the rain has been very heavy for two to four hours every afternoon, coming from giant convection thunderstorms forming at the windward edge of the northern mountains.

The forest stays wet, even in the morning sun, and so do I. It’s a great pleasure now to be under a roof, with dry air and dry sheets, at a picturesque waterfront guesthouse in Wahai.

The survey has been quite productive in terms of information gained about the forest types, geology and topography, and logistic routes. Our entry will be via a Javanese transmigration site called ‘Unit
O’ (now about 15 years old) to the east of the northern sector of the Manusela lowlands. We can reach Unit O by car or motorbike and store supplies at a house owned by the national park service and rented by a young couple who operate a basic general store. They will let us run up a tab, so that we can send out for vegetables and replenish supplies without sending cash. From Unit O, it’s a 4- to 6-hour hike (unladen/laden) through logged forest to the small, indigenous village of Kaloa, a tiny place of only about ten houses.

In a previous post I pointed out Elemata on GoogleEarth; Kaloa looks identical from the air, but even smaller. I had also wondered where the fields were in the satellite image: dumb question…the residents are of course sago eaters, so the areas generating this staple are not field but forest. We have been warmly received by the head of Kaloa, the bapak raja (a colonial Dutch-instigated term meaning the ‘father king’), who insists we stay in his dirt-floored home if we must spend the night. Waking in the misty dawn, hearing the shrieks of cockatoos from the outlined shapes of the giant trees that still surround Kaloa, I feel as far from anywhere known as perhaps I ever have. Yet as ever, people are people, and the farther you get from big towns, the kinder and more down-to-earth they become. Our three forest guides for the last five days, Yustus, Nus, and Agung, have been wonderful: hard-working and very considerate of our “forest clumsiness.”

Our guide, Yustus, leading us up the Wai Sawe.

With them, we forded the Wai (river) Isal in its wide, gravel-strewn channel, and entered the park. Giant Eucalyptus deglupta trees, with their blue-, green- and red-striped trunks, line the riverbanks, letting me know I’m not in Borneo. The floodplain forest that stretches for a kilometer either side of the river is magnificent in its very existence. Trees of this size have gone from most of the forests like this throughout Indonesia. Canarium, Aglaia, Anthocephalus, and Octomeles are common.

As we explored, we followed tributaries into the low hills. As predicted by the prior geology reports, this is an area of weathered sandstone, siltstone, and limestone. The tilted limestone layers form sharp, hard hillocks, with valuable ‘keyu besi’ (literally iron wood, Intsia palembanica) trees atop, while the siltstone weathers to slippery knife-edge ridges covered in rotan and other palms. We have also located a few wider ridges on harder sandstone which should make the most appropriate sites for our plots.

Tomorrow, I will head back in with more of the equipment and set up camp. Acun is on a supply-run to Masohi and will come back in with Endro, Yessi, and Yayah (staff from Herbarium Bogoriense) who had to delay their departure (partly because tomorrow is the important Muslim holy day of Idul Adha, when families rejoice with a meal of sacrificial beef).

Botanically speaking, I can’t wait to get to grips with the trees! So much is new to me. There seems to be a fair amount flowering, and as long as the trunks dry out enough in the sunny mornings to allow the tree climbers to grip them, we should be able to make some excellent collections.

I will probably not be able to send another post until mid November. Wish us luck!

Travel to Masohi was uneventful but long: the Jakarta-Ambon flight leaves Jakarta at 1:30am and arrives at 7:00am, meaning for me a night without sleep. Our team member and logistics expert Acun had arrived a day earlier in Ambon and done some shopping for things hard to find in Masohi (alcohol for plant collections and a good portable genset). I set off immediately from the airport for the Tolehu harbor and we arrived in time for the 9:00am fast ferry to Masohi, Seram. The ferry was so crowded I couldn’t get out to the railings to enjoy the sweeping views of the Ambon and Seram mountains over shimmering blue water, so I dozed a bit on the ‘VIP’ class deck, assailed by booming Maluccan karaoke videos.

Masohi is far enough off the tourist trail that foreigners are still a fun attraction for the kids; I was trailed for nearly a kilometer by this bunch, who demanded I also take their picture!

Masohi is a quiet, friendly town sited on a large, calm bay. The town is now divided into Christian and Muslim neighborhoods, and only the odd burned-out church offers evidence of the terrible ethnic clashes of a decade ago. Both Ambon and Masohi now have a relatively large permanent military presence, in the form of the fenced compounds of neat houses and green lawns that house battalions of TNI-AD, the Indonesian army.

Dining on local food is one of the best parts of travel for me, and I managed to find a restaurant selling ‘papeda’ and fish curry. Papeda is a clear, glutinous, nearly tasteless glue made from sago flour. Not particularly appetizing on its own, but it forms an unusual and not unpleasant base for tasty sauces. Love of sago products is mark of pride and identity for Eastern Indonesians and we’ll be eating a lot more of it as we leave the town. I’ll write more on the amazing sago palm in a later post.

Papeda, the sago-based glue food of Eastern Indonesia.

We were picked up at the harbor by a patrol car of the Manusela National Park Service, which has been wonderfully supportive from the start. Two members of PEH (the park’s research group) will accompany us from Masohi, Iik and Jumrin. Both joined Acun and Endro in April, and they are tremendously enthusiastic about learning our plot and plant collecting methodologies. The head of the park office here in Masohi, Pak Zul, has a background as a plant pest researcher, and has taken a genuine interest in our study. The great majority of research and data collection in Manusela has been on animals, particularly the endemic and rare parrots, and the park office has almost no information on the park’s plants. We all hope to change this, and as the result of our existing methods we should be able to put together an illustrated guide to the common lowlands trees of Manusela even before we leave.

Yesterday, apart from formulating a plan at the Park office, Acun and I did some shopping for the trip. We’ve decided to do a 3 to 4 day fast walk from Unit ‘O’ in the east of the northern park extension to Solea in the west in order to locate a good place for the camp. Acun, Iik, and Jumrin will then come back to Masohi to fully stock for the trip, and for Iik and Jumrin to spend Idul Adha (an important Islamic holy day) with their families. I should be able to compose the next blog entry at that time. Until then…into the woods!

Looking out over the lowland forest of north central Seram

After being delayed for a year as the result of my wife’s close call with a box jellyfish and subsequent illness (still not quite resolved), we’re off to Seram on Monday for the full expedition. This will be the second site we plan to sample for our current NSF-funded research on the biogeography and ecology of Indonesian trees. I hope to post a number of (nearly) live blog entries during this trip, although we expect to be offline for much of it, far even from any cell phone signal.

Seram is in the Maluku group of islands, the fabled ‘Spice Islands’ of the past, and still a major supplier of the world’s nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, and cloves. It’s east of Wallace’s Line, with a biota similar to New Guinea, although floristically the Maluku islands are closer to the others in ‘Wallacea’ (van Welzen et al. 2011) than to New Guinea. We hope to capture the signal of this biogeographic turnover in Asian and Australian plant clades (evolutionary lineages) with our sampling of forest trees. To minimize variation in clades due primarily to soils among our five sites, we will be trying to match rock substrate as far as possible: we’ll avoid limestone and try to locate mid- to low-fertility sites on granite- or sandstone-derived, well-draining soils. This can be difficult in eastern Indonesia, where so many of the islands are either volcanic or young limestone (from raised reefs). However, the wide plain of north central Seram occurs over Pleistocene coastal sand deposits, and the foothills of the metamorphic Kobipoto massif are widely overlain by sandstones (Payton 1993). We’re also looking for local variation in elevation, so we can site some plots on drier ridges and some in moister valleys, but all below ca. 400 m ASL.

Target sample site, in the Manusela National Park

When I first visited Seram on a ‘recce’ trip last September, I was struck by the great extent of remaining forest compared to the devastated land in Borneo. However, much of the lowland forest was an almost mono-dominant stand of a valuable dipterocarp, Shorea selanica, and logging concessions to the east and west of the Manusela lowlands have been operating for many years (Kinnaird et al. 2003). While the permitting requirements for working in National Parks in Indonesia are significant, most of the remaining intact forests are still in protected areas and our five sample sites will probably all be located in parks. On my recce and during the short collecting trip carried out by Endro and Acun in April, the director and staff of Seram’s Manusela National Park were very supportive and welcoming, and we look forward to working with them again.

Overall, we are being steered towards a target sample site in the foothills of the Kobipoto range, a day or two’s walk inland from the north coast, probably along the very wide, pebbly riverbeds that drain northwards (open this KML file in GoogleEarth). I’m particularly drawn to visit the village of Elemata, which appears on GoogleMaps/Earth as a cluster of ten thatched houses in a small clearing 20 km up the Wai Isal river. Where are their fields? How do they travel in? I’m aware that this satellite image was taken in 2005. A lot could have changed in seven years, let alone since the last botanical collecting survey (Kato & Ueda 1988) passed through in 1985, led by Professor Kato of the University of Tokyo.

Preparations have been underway for several weeks now. While Seram is not really remote (there is a road along the north coast, and there is mobile phone reception in Wahai), setting off into the forest for six weeks, not knowing exactly where we are going, does make one feel a certain kinship with the ‘explorers’ of the last century. We’ll have to solve challenges of route finding, camp building, supply chains, cash caching (no ATMs past Masohi on the south coast), and health issues. We must deal sensitively with the expectations of team members and local villagers, and patiently with local government representatives. Our ‘warm up’ trip into Gunung Palung last year serves as a template for our research methods and will guide us in purchasing sufficient supplies. But compared to Kalimantan, I don’t know Maluku at all—weather, local customs, bugs, prices—and I am aware of all the things that could go wrong. I do hope I won’t have to report on this blog that I’m back home after two weeks, having sustained some serious mishap.

One of the main ways that today’s collecting trips differ from those of the last century is our use of electronics. I’ve been cramming maps into my new GPS unit (see another post on this) and downloading and organizing a PDF library of articles. Over the past few years I’ve been scanning all the relevant botanical books I can find and now have a good digital library that fits on a tablet computer. Not that we need to identify things in the field, but it makes it more fun, and should increase our efficiency slightly by alerting us to which species are very common and not in need of collection. We’ll also bring the photos of collections that Endro and Acun made in April. As with other aspects of Maluku life, I don’t know the flora, and will be very excited to get many new ‘personal firsts’ for plant genera. Our species management model—doing leaf matching via photographs in the field (explained in detail here)—means we also need digital cameras and laptops. The drawbacks of being dependent on all these gizmos are that they’re heavy, they break, they don’t like rain/rivers, and they need power. As with last time, we’ll bring a small gasoline generator into the forest with us. Now if we can just remember the extra spark plugs!

Next post hopefully from Masohi, in southern Seram.

References

• Kato, M. and Ueda, K. 1988. Taxonomic Studies of the Plants of Seram Island. Botanical Gardens, University of Tokyo.
• Payton, M. 1993. Soils of the Manusela National Park. In Edwards, I. D. et al. Natural History of Seram: Maluku, Indonesia. Andover, England: Intercept.

The first collection made by our parataxonomist team in Seram, probably an Ericaceae

While no one doubts this role of experience, a recent paper by Bebber et al. (2012) reviewing numbers of type-specimens per collector suggests that long experience makes one disproportionately more successful at finding new species (type specimens are those plant collections associated with the descriptions of new species). The authors found that “more than half of all type specimens were collected by less than 2 per cent of collectors.” This group of ‘elite collectors’ has been vitally important to the discovery of plant diversity, but the number of people in this demographic (herbarium-employed, expatriate, general collectors) is dwindling. A new model must emerge if we are to continue, and indeed step up, plant species discovery before it is too late. In a related article in Nature, John Whitfield (2012) quotes John Wood, an active elite collector, as saying, “It’s possible that the days of the non-native plant collector are virtually at an end, and people like myself are the last examples.”

During my time working in Southeast Asia, I have been repeatedly struck by the enthusiasm of young local scientists and students for getting out in the field and collecting. Surely their energy can be harnessed for discovering plants in their countries? It should be a natural switch: from expat experts to more local ones. The question is: who and how? Local professional botanists are the obvious inheritors of the ‘elite’ crown, and it is likely that a sizable proportion of the ‘2%’ were not expats. In Indonesia today, elite collectors would include Mien Rifai, Ismail Rachman (Herbarium Bogoriense), and Kade Sidayasa (Wanariset, E Kal), and younger professionals on their way up including Ary Keim (Herbarium Bogoriense), Charlie Heatubun, and Krisma Lekitoo (both from Forest Research Center, Manokwari). But in a country the size of Indonesia, even experienced, well-traveled national botanists may not return to a place frequently enough to really come to know a flora—although a developed sense for where to look for new species in a new place will help them.

So I believe there’s a vital role for local, non-professionals who can be trained to be very effective ‘plant-spotters.’ With our current work in Borneo, Teguh Triono and I are working with two groups to build local capacity for plant discovery: university biology students and park rangers. The goal is to maximize the botanical capabilities of those with little experience using technology (Webb et al. 2010), while identifying and retaining those special few with ‘the eye for plants’ who desire to go further and become so-called ‘parataxonomists,’ or plant experts working outside normal academic channels (Basset et al. 2000, Pfeiffer and Uril 2003, Basset et al., 2004).

The stilt roots of a giant Pandanus tree. “How do we collect this one?” asked Iik (right) to Endro (left)

After three years, I am pleased to apply the term parataxonomists to our field assistants, Endro and Acun. Their collecting trip to Seram was a way to further develop their skills and confidence, and also to assess the effectiveness of the model of using parataxonomists for core collecting work. Their specimens are now back in Bogor and have been dried, and our herbarium team are starting to examine them. It will be tremendously exciting if we have one or two new species.

While on the trip, Endro and Acun spread the collecting methods they had learned. Endro writes:

“The first day we surveyed the river as we usually do in Borneo. It was great to see the enthusiasm of the team. We started with a demonstration of how to collect, and since the team was learning, we did not expect to make many collections on this first day. However, if we did a good job with the training, the whole trip should be more effective.

One funny thing was when Iik (Manusela park staff) asked, “How about collecting pandans?” I described my experience from Borneo, that normally we have no problem collecting them, even their stilt roots. Then Iik pointed to a pandan nearby, and I had to laugh: the plant was huge, with many stilt roots, each 20 cm in diameter, and a total height of more than 20 m!

We got ten specimens on this first day, from lianas, trees, and pandans, quite satisfactory. Several of the trees were quite tall, but the tree climbers rose to the challenge. And the training went well, with everyone happy with their different roles. We also talked about types of plants and how we can identify them.”

The training offered by Endro and Acun was so welcomed and successful that we have initiated discussions about developing a plant collecting program at the Manusela Park office. Imagine if we had experienced parataxonomists based at each national park in Indonesia, making high quality collections with DNA vouchers, taking photos, and uploading the data to networked databases. While individually none of them may ever collect as many type specimens as the elite global collectors of yesterday’s botany, as a group they may still be successful at finding many new, rare species, because locally they will be ‘elite parataxonomists.’

References

• Basset Y, Novotny V, Miller SE, and Pyle R. 2000. Quantifying biodiversity: experience with parataxonomists and digital photography in Papua New Guinea and Guyana. BioScience 50:899–908.
• Basset Y, Novotny V, Miller SE, Weiblen GD, Missa O, and Stewart AJA. 2004. Conservation and biological monitoring of tropical forests: the role of parataxonomists. Journal of Applied Ecology 41:163–174.
• Bebber DP, Carine MA, Davidse G, Harris DJ, Haston EM, Penn MG, Cafferty S, Wood JRI, Scotland RW. 2012. Big hitting collectors make massive and disproportionate contribution to the discovery of plant species. Proc. R. Soc. B, 279:2269-2274
• Pfeiffer J., Uril Y. 2003. The role of indigenous parataxonomists in botanical inventory: from Herbarium Amboinense to Herbarium Floresense. Telopea 10:61–72.
• Webb CO, Slik JWF, Triono T. 2010. Biodiversity inventory and informatics in Southeast Asia. Biodiversity and Conservation 19: 955-972.
• Whitfield J. 2012. Superstars of botany. Nature 484: 436-438.