Quantifying and conserving West Papuan wetland forests

Background
The island of New Guinea is the most biodiverse island on Earth. This vast diversity is distributed across a range of ecosystem types, including a mosaic of forested wetlands at low elevations. In addition to their biodiversity, these ecosystems potentially harbour substantial carbon stocks in the form of deep peat. Despite their importance, the drivers of carbon and biodiversity patterns and conservation risks in these ecosystems remain unquantified. Furthermore, in contrast to most neighbouring regions of Southeast Asia, much of these ecosystems remain largely intact, although development has been increasing rapidly over recent years.

Novelty and timeliness
In 2019, the 100,000 km2 Indonesian province of West Papua was declared as a conservation province, meaning that all future development must be sustainable. This declaration presents an important opportunity to protect some of Earths most biologically valuable and carbon rich forests. One exciting pathway for this conservation comes from payments for ecological services schemes, whereby large multinational companies provide payment to tropical nations/landowners/local communities in exchange for safeguarding forests. This project will be co-supervised by partners at Wildlifeworks, a community-focused market-based conservation company that uses carbon credits market to conserve tropical forests globally.

Objectives: This PhD project will leverage an exciting combination of new field data collections and novel remote sensing approaches to:
1. Quantify the carbon stocks of wetland/peatland ecosystems across Western Papua.
2. Identify the biophysical drivers of tree beta-diversity in Papuan wetland ecosystems.
3. Predict where land-use change will occur over coming decades within the lowland wetland mosaic and where conservation interventions could be directed.

New Guinea is the second largest and most floristically diverse island on Earth with exceptional levels of endemic species (Cámara-Leret et al., 2020). This diversity is distributed across a range of ecosystem types including the third largest area of tropical rainforest after Amazonia and central Africa. New Guinea itself is split between Indonesia in the west (Tanah Papua) and Papua New Guinea in the east. Tanah Papua is home to a vast mosaic of lowland forested floodplains and wetlands which potentially harbour substantial carbon stocks in the form of peat. Despite improved wetland mapping in recent years (e.g. Anda et al., 2021) the distribution and drivers of biodiversity and carbon stocks in these wetland forests remain poorly understood. The same is true for the drivers of conservation risks in these ecosystems which remain largely intact, unlike neighbouring regions in Southeast Asia, but are less protected than upland forests (Parsch et al., 2022). This presents an opportunity to identify the most important and threatened areas to better prioritise and target conservation actions. This is timely because deforestation, primarily for oil palm cultivation, is expanding in the region (Austin et al., 2017) at the same time that there is momentum to protect at least 70% of Tanah Papua and promote sustainable development under the Manokwari Declaration (Cámara-Leret et al., 2019). There is also scope to explore pathways to forest conservation through Sago palm (Metroxylon sagu) agroforestry or payments from instruments like carbon credits, but these cannot be properly valued unless these forests are better understood. This PhD project will leverage a combination of new field data collections and novel remote sensing approaches to address these gaps.
References
Anda, M., Ritung, S., Suryani, E., Sukarman, Hikmat, M., Yatno, E., Mulyani, A., Subandiono, R. E., Suratman, & Husnain. (2021). Revisiting tropical peatlands in Indonesia: Semi-detailed mapping, extent and depth distribution assessment. Geoderma, 402, 115235. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.GEODERMA.2021.115235
Austin, K. G., Mosnie