A Couple of New Papers Just Before the End of a Productive 2011
Posted by Lian Pin Koh on 30 December 2011
It's been a while since I last updated this news page. Just a quick mention of two exciting new articles recently published online.
The first is a collaboration with Oscar Venter
from James Cook University in Australia. 
Oscar is a
world-leading expert on REDD+ issues, and it has been a pleasure working with him on this paper.
"Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+): game changer or just another quick fix?" is published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
This is an invited paper that discusses the main opportunities and challenges for REDD+ implementation, including expectations for REDD+ to deliver on multiple environmental and societal co-benefits.
The second noteworthy paper is part of a special issue in Biological Conservation that is dedicated to my late mentor and friend, Prof. Navjot Sodhi,
who sadly and unexpectedly passed away earlier this year.
"Sensible consumerism for environmental sustainability" was written in collaboration with my buddy Tien Ming Lee from Columbia University.
It is a neat little scenario analysis that demonstrates how changes in consumer behavior in industrialized nations could substantially alleviate environmental impacts associated with agricultural production in the developing tropics.
All in all, 2011 has been a very productive and successful year. I'm very much looking forward to an even better 2012!
Update on UAV-Orangutan Project
Posted by Lian Pin Koh on 15 September 2011
Serge Wich and Lian Pin Koh have started developing the UAV system for surveying orangutans in Sumatra. They have learned a lot from a wonderful website for building Do-It-Yourself UAVs. The prototype is based on a low-cost remote controlled glider plane, although they are also exploring alternatives. The plane is guided by an onboard autopilot system with various sensors, including a barometer and GPS.
Some pictures and a video of our progress follow below.
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
First ACEAS workshop. Success!
Posted by Lian Pin Koh on 10 July 2011
As mentioned in a previous post, Lian Pin Koh is part of an international effort that seeks to produce more precise estimates of species extinction rates.
This project is funded by the Australian Centre for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis (ACEAS).
The team conducted its first workshop from 4 to 8 July in the Linneaus Estate, near Byron Bay, Australia. Our key achievements are neatly summarised in Corey Bradshaw's blog. I re-post some of the key points here:
Our first major achievement was the development of a spatial community simulation to examine various assumptions underlying species-area relationships (SAR).
Fangliang He developed the code to simulate landscapes populated by many species following various abundance patterns and aggregation coefficients;
Barry Brook developed the sampling code to construct SAR and endemic species-area relationships (EAR), incorporating aspects of extinction debt;
and Corey Bradshaw developed a spatial habitat-destroying routine that constructs harvest patch distributions from completely random to highly clumped (based on the negative
binomial distribution). We haven’t yet put it all together, but most of the base code is written. If you’ve been following the minor dust-up in the ecological
literature about SAR, you’ll understand why this photo is funny.
Lian Pin, Stephen Gregory, Xingli Giam and Cagan Sekercioglu worked feverishly on constructing biogeographical realm- and hotspot-scale SAR for birds and mammals at a global scale. Lian Pin and Tien Ming Lee have put together a series of land-use projections (incorporating deforestation trends and climate change expectations) and we will combine these with the global-scale SARs to estimate extinction rates in these taxa.
Nigel Stork focused on putting together papers and datasets looking at relaxation times (extinction debt) for various taxa. Our goal here is to put together a meta-analytical paper on relaxation times.
Working hard on the extinction rate estimation problem Damien Fordham, Stephen Gregory and Corey focussed on constructing SAR
for coral reef fish on the Great Barrier Reef using species richness and abundance predictions they published last year.
We’ll be projecting coral bleaching events using combined global circulation model predictions of sea surface temperatures, and predicting reef fish species loss based on the extent of predicted bleaching.
Finally, Fangliang He and Cagan Sekercioglu worked on putting together bird range-loss data to estimate population size reductions based on a model Fangliang developed.
The extinction team will regroup in October/November 2011 for its second workshop.
Further Information
ConservationBytes.com: Life, death and Linneaus
A Tribute to Navjot Sodhi (1962-2011)
Posted by Lian Pin Koh & Tien Ming Lee on 13 June 2011
Tien Ming and I got to know Navjot personally when we
joined the then Conservation and Behavioral Ecology Lab about 12 years ago. I
was just starting my Honors research in the fourth year of my bachelor program.
Ming was Navjot’s UROPS student. We eventually stayed on through our Masters
research.
There was never any doubt that Navjot would have to be our project supervisor. With his trademark baseball cap, t-shirt, bermudas and sandals, Navjot was easily the coolest and hippest Professor in the block.
Navjot’s mentoring style was just as unique. He never expected his students to show up in his lab from 8 to 5. In fact, he once told me that he didn’t care if I danced naked as long as I got the job done. I think I became quite good at one of those two things, thanks to Navjot.
A typical day in the Sodhi lab would begin with him and his students having coffee or tea around the sofa corner. Of course, the daily gossip would perk everyone up, much more effectively than any caffeinated beverage.
As our conversations would switch effortlessly between gossip and serious work, we would scribble equations, graphs and models on the whiteboard. Several of those doodles would later turn into publications in Nature and Science journals, and have profound impacts on conservation science.
Sometimes our conversations would drift towards the more philosophical. When I once asked Navjot what he would have liked to accomplish as a scientist, he replied that science progresses in small steps, to which he hoped to contribute a little.
In fact, Navjot achieved much more, in his relatively short career, than what others could ever hope to do in their lifetimes, ourselves included. For his research on the many aspects of Southeast Asian biodiversity and conservation, he had come to be known as Mr. Southeast Asia to his colleagues.
Tien Ming and I had remained in touch with Navjot even after we left his lab a few years ago. Navjot continued to advise and support our careers. In fact, the way Navjot cared about us was no different than how a father would care for his children. He was extremely generous and forgiving, and never expected anything in return.
I last saw Navjot earlier this year in April, when I visited him at his home. Physically he was a poor shadow of himself, but mentally he was as sharp as ever. We gossiped and chatted as usual. And we even planned to work more closely together when he got better.
We are proud to have Navjot as our academic father. We are even prouder to have had him as a dear friend. The world lost a great scientist on 12 June 2011, and we miss him tremendously.
Our sincerest condolences to Bubblie, Ada and Darwin.
-Lian Pin Koh & Tien Ming Lee (13 June 2011)
Tribute page on Facebook: Remembering Navjot
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