News

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Surveying Orangutans with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle!

Posted by Lian Pin Koh on 25 August 2011

Lian Pin Koh is part of a team of researchers, led by Dr. Serge Wich of PanEco/University of Zurich, who have been awarded a National Geographic Society Waitt Grant. This funds will support the development of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system for monitoring Sumatran orangutan populations.

All great ape species are endangered due to rapid habitat loss and hunting. For effective conservation, it is essential to monitor their numbers on a regular basis. Typically, this involves costly ground surveys (~US$ 250,000 per cycle per species), which are beyond the operations budget of most local NGOs. Therefore, there is a need to develop more cost-effective monitoring methods.

The NGS funding will allow us to adapt and further improve upon a UAV system to conduct aerial orangutan nest surveys in Sumatra. This small and portable aircraft, which has an on-board high-resolution digital camera, can be programmed to take photographs along GPS-guided route and alttitude defined by the user.

If successful, this new approach will effectively replace ground surveys of orangutan nests located in the forest canopy. And it will allow researchers to survey orangutan populations at negligible operational costs and at much higher frequency than currently possible. This method could also potentially be adapted for surveying other species, which would lead to a dramatic decrease in wildlife monitoring costs.

Further Information
National Geographic Society Waitt Grants

Supporting REDD+ Policy Decisions: Scenario analysis of implementing Indonesia's moratorium on forest conversion

Posted by Lian Pin Koh on 29 March 2011

As part of the Norway-Indonesia REDD+ agreement (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), Indonesia is obligated to implement a moratorium to suspend all new concessions for conversion of peat and natural forests. However, definitions of natural forest and peat vary among stakeholders, with unclear implications for carbon, biodiversity and development opportunity costs.

Lian Pin Koh is leading an international team of researchers to help the United Nations-REDD programme evaluate the opportunity costs of suspending forest conversion in Central Kalimantan under alternative moratorium interpretations and scenarios.

Further Information
UN-REDD Programme: Website
Jakarta Post: The Indonesian deforestation moratorium: The devil is in the details

Precise Estimates of Modern Biodiversity Extinction Rates

Posted by Lian Pin Koh on 28 March 2011

The Earth’s biodiversity has experienced 5 mass extinction events since the Cambrian. Extinction has kept pace with speciation, with >99% of all species that have ever existed now gone. Despite consensus that biodiversity has entered the 6th mass extinction, dubbed the Anthropocene because of human-driven changes, estimated extinction rates above background are highly imprecise. This arises partly because species richness is unknown for many taxa, and most extinctions go unnoticed. Without precise estimates of modern extinction rates, the urgency of the biodiversity crisis is not appreciated by society, and efforts to reduce biodiversity loss are weakened.

Lian Pin Koh is part of an international group of scientists recently awarded funding from the Australian Centre for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis –ACEAS– to run a series of analytical workshops to estimate, with a little more precision and less bias than has been done previously, the extinction rates of today’s biota relative to deep-time extinctions.

Further Information
ConservationBytes.com: How fast are we losing species anyway?

New Study: Satellites identify, monitor expanding oil palm plantations

Posted by Lian Pin Koh on 8 March 2011

Scientists have developed a new satellite-based mapping method that for the first time identifies and monitors the amount of land covered by mature oil palm trees.

Lian Pin Koh is part of a team of researchers who applied the new satellite-based mapping technique to quantify the extent of peatswamp forests that has been converted to oil palm plantations in Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra. They also quantified resulting impacts on carbon emissions and biodiversity.

“Remotely sensed evidence of tropical peatland conversion to oil palm,” is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) DOI │ PDF │ SI

Media Features
Nature News: Counting the carbon costs of peatland conversion
Time Magazine: Palm oil plantations equal deforestation
Scientific American: Satellites present a better picture of deforestation
Fast Company: Biofuel-harvesting palm oil plantations drive CO2 levels higher
Mongabay: First large-scale map of oil palm plantations reveals big environmental toll