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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.
Deforestation in Seram vs. West Kalimantan
December 4, 2012 by Cam Webb
I’m back at home in Sukadana, West Kalimantan (Borneo). I had to leave Seram a few days before Acun and Endro, but I trusted them fully to tidy up the last of the morphotyping and collections. Pak Zul, the head of the Manusela National Park, was again wonderfully supportive, and all the specimen transport permits were processed in a couple days in Masohi. more »
Masihulan, a conservation success
November 26, 2012 by Cam Webb
We rode a dump truck back up the coast road to Masihulan, to a spot just below where the new highway improbably climbs up and over the precipitous limestone mountains. A roomy park office “information center” stands just inside the park boundary, and we moved in there for the next 10 days to work on a plot in this lowland forest (albeit 300 m ASL) on limestone. more »
The “model forest” at Toluarang
November 13, 2012 by Cam Webb
Tired from days of hiking and worrying, and feeling like I was running out of options, I decided to opt for a relatively easy choice: making plots, or in this case one large plot, at a site on the main north Seram road where it slices through the Manusela park. While access could not be easier, it turned out the forest was not without its challenges! more »
Ulu Sawe
November 9, 2012 by Cam Webb
I’m back in Wahai, looking out over low tide in the sheltered lagoon in front of the guesthouse. We’re taking our first rest day since the trip began, and just returned from snorkeling and fishing. Team members Acun and Endro are avid fishermen and had, until this morning, been skunked in every river and bay that they had tried in Seram. more »
Up for air
October 23, 2012 by Cam Webb
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. 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 that we had left a couple months earlier. more »
Travel to Masohi
October 18, 2012 by Cam Webb
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 is 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. more »
Return to Seram! (Preparations)
October 15, 2012 by Cam Webb
After being delayed a year, 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 put up a number of (almost) live blog entries during the trip, although we expect to be offline for the much of it, far even from cell phone signal. more »
The future of plant collecting: a role for ‘elite parataxonomists’
May 8, 2012 by Cam Webb
If 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 »
Last modified: July 23, 2012 | ©
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