Newton Fund - Wallacea ProgrammeNewton Fund - Wallacea ProgrammeResearchers led by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Herbarium Bogoriense, Surya University and Universitas Nusa Cendana have surveyed the seasonal forests in Sumbawa and nearby islands to quantify carbon stocks and characterise plant diversity in these little-studied ecosystems.
Whilst tree diversity of seasonal forests is lower than that of Indonesia’s better known wet tropical forests, these unique habitats support many endemic species that are threatened with extinction due to land-use change, fire and volcanic eruptions.
These threats call into question whether the forests will continue to tolerate more extreme drought and more frequent fires expected with climate change – risking the valuable carbon stocks they currently support.
Wallacea is a particularly understudied region for biodiversity–botanical collections and carbon stock assessments are far fewer than in the African and American tropics.
RBG Kew has been training Indonesian students, academics and practitioners in census and monitoring techniques to help assess the status of seasonal forests.
The team developed online courses with a reach across the archipelago to provide expertise on species identification, GIS, carbon stock assessment, Red-Listing and seed banking.
Such skills are key to the ongoing monitoring of forest carbon and biodiversity, and are crucial to long-term scientific collaboration between the UK and Indonesia.
Mitchell et al. 2022. Severity of deforestation mediates biotic homogenisation in an island archipelago. Ecography. e05990.
Voigt, et al. 2021. Emerging threats from deforestation and forest fragmentation in the Wallacea centre of endemism. Environmental Research Letters 16: 094048.
Winarni et al 2023. Bird diversity in forest and coconut farms of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
