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Arnold Arboretum Senior Research Scientist and tropical biologist Cam Webb will be spending the next three years researching forest biodiversity in Indonesia, a collaboration with Sargent Fellow Sarah Mathews and senior Indonesian collaborator Teguh Triono. Join Cam and his colleagues as they collect plants, take photographs, and analyze molecular and ecological data gathered in research plots on five Indonesian islands. Examining hundreds of species of plants and their respective habitats will contribute to our understanding of how forests and the plants in them evolved and respond to current environmental pressures. Along the way, you will be introduced to fascinating organisms, encounter the full forces of nature, and meet the dedicated Indonesians who assist with the research efforts and protect these remarkable forests. This work is made possible through a grant from the National Science Foundation.
The future of plant collecting: a role for ‘elite parataxonomists’
May 8, 2012 by Cam Webb
f you were dropped in a unknown forest or grassland and told to start collecting the plants, you would start with what you encountered first, which would be the common species. All ecological communities are dominated primarily by a few common species, with a long tail of rare species (a hollow rank abundance curve); a good rule of thumb is that 50% of the individuals belong to only 10% of the species. more »
Seram: Into the forest
April 23, 2012 by Cam Webb
Finally our departure day arrived. Accompanied by two park staff (Jumrin Said and Iik Ikhwan) we left on our collecting trip, heading for ‘Camp Illie’ [a national park ranger campsite near a river, high in the central mountains of Seram], three hours away by bus. more »
Field guides, past and future
June 9, 2011 by Cam Webb
Finding the name for a tree in the Bornean forest is a pleasurable challenge. There is no guidebook to the tree species of Borneo, and we don’t even have a comprehensive checklist (an estimate of the number of known species is 5,000, but it is likely there are many more still undescribed). more »
Heading Out
May 27, 2011 by Cam Webb
We finished our expedition on Thursday last week. What a great trip it was. It has been several years since I have been able to spend such a long time in the forest, and this trip has reminded me of how satisfying the ‘field life’ is. more »
Climbing Trees
May 25, 2011 by Cam Webb
Amazingly, the timing of our expedition has gone almost exactly to plan. Before we started, I could only estimate that setting up, morphotyping, and collecting from six 0.25-hectare plots might take two months. Until I finished the final image matching a week and a half ago, we didn’t know how many trees would need to be collected. more »
Snakes and leeches
May 18, 2011 by Cam Webb
“So, is the forest dangerous?” I get asked this a lot. The short answer is, “Probably no more dangerous than life in a U.S. city, and definitely less dangerous than anything involving motor vehicles.” Venomous snakes are often perceived to be a big danger, but the fact is that we almost never see snakes in the forest. more »
Dangerous Trees
May 16, 2011 by Cam Webb
The general health of our team members has been good, but two have been suffering from serious dermatitis caused by exposure to the sap of trees in the Anacardiaceae—the poison ivy family. Trees in this family are common in the forest, and exposure is hard to avoid. more »
Pak Long the hunter
May 13, 2011 by Cam Webb
We have kept our supply chain running via the labor of one particular porter, Pak Long, affectionately known as "Mister Short." Pak Long hikes the five hour route with a 20 kg load, and then hikes back to the village the same afternoon, repeating the trip every other day. We originally set the price for the trip expecting suppliers to take two days for the round trip, so Pak Long is making a very good local wage by being so quick. more »
Food
May 11, 2011 by Cam Webb
From the profound (or at least academic) to the mundane (but oh so important): food. They say an army marches on its stomach—well, so does a research team. We’ve been trying to keep the food plentiful and tasty, and so far there have been few complaints. more »
Up to Date
May 9, 2011 by Cam Webb
So far, I have finished the matching in four plots (A-D), and from these 752 trees (larger than 10 cm diameter) of 236 morphotypes. Since the plot size is a quarter hectare, it is tempting to announce that this also corresponds to a diversity of 236 species per hectare, among the highest for any rain forest anywhere. more »
Riam Parit
May 2, 2011 by Cam Webb
After spending time in the damp and often dim forest—its many wonders notwithstanding—it always feels good to sit by the river. The air is slightly drier, and where the river is wide enough, it cuts a narrow chasm in the green roof of trees. more »
The River
April 29, 2011 by Cam Webb
The riverscapes near our camp look especially gorgeous—cold, sparkling water splashes over rounded granite boulders, flowing between the red-barked Tristaniopsis whiteana (Myrtaceae) trees which line the sandier rivers in this part of Borneo. more »
Work begins in Plot A
April 27, 2011 by Cam Webb
The day after moving our camp, we began work on ‘Plot A,’ in a lovely patch of alluvial forest. This, for me, is the best work there is: going from tree to tree and making notes; observing leaves through binoculars more »
Moving camp
April 25, 2011 by Cam Webb
I arrived back from the last trip out to find that the team had discovered a huge, leaning dead tree—a ‘widow-maker’—behind our camp, and no one was comfortable staying at the site any longer. These trees can come crashing down with no warning. more »
Biodiversity
April 22, 2011 by Cam Webb
In addition to documenting and analyzing forest composition, we will also be doing general plant collecting at all our sites to record the amazing biodiversity of this under-studied part of the world. We made our first collection during the hike into the forest: as I gingerly walked down the trunk of a fallen tree from a high bank into a riverbed, I saw that it had sent up living branches that were flowering and easy to collect. more »
The forest
April 20, 2011 by Cam Webb
Knowing the hill forest on the west slopes of Gunung Palung from my thesis research at the Cabang Panti Research Station many years ago, I have been looking forward to seeking differences in tree composition in this valley. more »
Setting up a research camp
April 18, 2011 by Cam Webb
The gibbons’ whooping song is the defining melody of the Bornean dawn chorus. They tend to only sing on days that promise to be fine, and so one’s spirits always rise on hearing them, assisted by the expectation of a great local cup of coffee and the resinous smell of woodsmoke. I’m a research scientist at the Arnold Arboretum, and this is how days begin on our expedition to the inner valley of Gunung Palung National Park, in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. more »
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