BIODIVERSITY AND LAND-USE IMPACTS ON TROPICAL ECOSYSTEM FUNCTION (BALI)

Anthropogenic disturbance and land-use change in the tropics is leading to irrevocable changes in biodiversity and substantial shifts in ecosystem biogeochemistry. Yet, we still have a poor understanding of how human-driven changes in biodiversity feed back to alter biogeochemical processes. This knowledge gap substantially restricts our ability to model and predict the response of tropical ecosystems to current and future environmental change. There are a number of critical challenges to our understanding of how changes in biodiversity may alter ecosystem processes in the tropics; namely: (i) how the high taxonomic diversity of the tropics is linked to ecosystem functioning, (ii) how changes in the interactions among trophic levels and taxonomic groups following disturbance impacts upon functional diversity and biogeochemistry, and (iii) how plot-level measurements can be used to scale to whole landscapes. We have formed a consortium to address these critical challenges to launch a large-scale, replicated, and fully integrated study that brings together a multi-disciplinary team with the skills and expertise to study the necessary taxonomic and trophic groups, different biogeochemical processes, and the complex interactions amongst them.

To understand and quantify the effects of land-use change on the activity of focal biodiversity groups and how this impacts biogeochemistry, we will: (i) analyse pre-existing data on distributions of focal biodiversity groups; (ii) sample the landscape-scale treatments at the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) Project site (treatments include forest degradation, fragmentation, oil palm conversion) and key auxiliary sites (Maliau Basin - old growth on infertile soils, Lambir Hills - old growth on fertile soils, Sabah Biodiversity Experiment - rehabilitated forest, INFAPRO-FACE - rehabilitated forest); and (iii) implement new experiments that manipulate key components of biodiversity and pathways of belowground carbon flux.

The manipulations will focus on trees and lianas, mycorrhizal fungi, termites and ants, because these organisms are the likely agents of change for biogeochemical cycling in human-modified tropical forests. We will use a combination of cutting-edge techniques to test how these target groups of organisms interact each other to affect biogeochemical cycling. We will additionally collate and analyse archived data on other taxa, including vertebrates of conservation concern. The key unifying concept is the recognition that so-called 'functional traits' play a key role in linking taxonomic diversity to ecosystem function. We will focus on identifying key functional traits associated with plants, and how they vary in abundance along the disturbance gradient at SAFE. In particular, we propose that leaf functional traits (e.g. physical and chemical recalcitrance, nitrogen content, etc.) play a pivotal role in determining key ecosystem processes and also strongly influence atmospheric composition. Critically, cutting-edge airborne remote sensing techniques suggest it is possible to map leaf functional traits, chemistry and physiology at landscape-scales, and so we will use these novel airborne methods to quantify landscape-scale patterns of forest degradation, canopy structure, biogeochemical cycling and tree distributions. Process-based mathematical models will then be linked to the remote sensing imagery and ground-based measurements of functional diversity and biogeochemical cycling to upscale our findings over disturbance gradients.

Beneficiaries will include the policy makers associated with the development of REDD+ schemes (including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNCCC] and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]), forest managers at company and State level, the oil palm industry, academic institutions in Malaysia, and the conservation sector globally.

REDD+ policy: Results from this project will provide information of key relevance to the management and monitoring of degraded forests within REDD+ schemes. In particular this work will quantify the impacts of habitat degradation and change on belowground biodiversity and processes and develop a series of robust indicators, which can be developed into effective monitoring strategies to assess forest degradation and recovery. REDD+ policy is of particular importance given UNFCCC COP negotiations in Doha in December 2012. The UNFCCC are active in developing guidance for REDD+, and REDD+ is one of the hottest topics in development of the IPCC chapter on Agriculture Forestry and Other Land Use.

Forest Managers: Belowground processes are key to sustainable forest management. The development of user-friendly survey techniques will allow timber industries to assess the impacts of existing management options more fully. |In particular the project will allow assessment of key strategies for aiding forest recovery; crucial for sustainable timber production in the region.

Oil palm industry: The increasing focus of the global oil palm industry on corporate social responsibility and the development of more sustainable management practices through schemes such as the RSPO, has precipitated a growing need for robust monitoring of belowground processes associated with sustainable oil palm production. The indicators developed in this project will be key to this and will facilitate the monitoring of these processes in a plantation context for the first time.

Academic institutions in Malaysia: Despite a growing body of biodiversity research in the region, the biodiversity of Southeast Asia, particularly that of belowground components, remains relatively little studied. Such a knowledge gap can act as a barrier for continued ecological research in the region. This project will provide detailed information on species data for belowground systems.

Conservation sector: The growth of tropical agriculture represents the major threat to biodiversity globally. However, conservation organizations are sometimes hampered in their ability to converse with government policy makers, through lack of detailed information about the impacts of habitat change. This project will fill a knowledge gap in this area and provide detailed data on the impacts of habitat change on below ground biodiversity and ecosystem processes.