BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN

A LECTURE by a University of Leeds academic on the introduction of long-term monitoring work in Southeast Asia on tropical forests will be held on October 29 at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD).

The lecture, titled “Biomass dynamics of tropical forests through on-the-ground observations”, will be delivered by Dr Lan Qie, from the University of Leeds School of Geography.

It will begin at 2.30pm, at the FSM 2.18, Faculty of Science building. It is hosted by the Institute for Biodiversity and Environmental Research (IBER), is part of the IBER Seminar Series.

UBD in a statement said that the talk will give an overview of results from on-the-ground tropical forest observations from South America and Africa.

It will also provide an introduction on the long-term plot monitoring work in Southeast Asia as part of the “Tropical forests in the changing earth system” (T-FORCES) project, which is a pan-tropical collaborative research network led by University of Leeds.

In Southeast Asia, priority has been given to Borneo, the largest island in the Sundanic biogeographical subregion, where an ongoing systematic recensus has included over 50 long-term plots in Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei and Kalimantan, bringing data up-to-date for some of the oldest plots in the region (48 years).

UBD said the lecture will highlight the project’s aim that is to develop a sustainable, collaborative, long-term forest plot network in the region as part of a Pan-Tropical Observatory of Forest Function.

Dr Lan Qie comes from an interdisciplinary background — she has a BSc in Electronic Engineering (Fudan University, China), and MSc in Bioengineering and a PhD in Ecology (National University of Singapore).

She has conducted studies on different taxa in Southeast Asia including dung beetles), frogs, birds and butterflies. Her current project sets out to quantify the carbon balance in Southeast Asia’s old-growth forests and possible changes over the past decades, and to identify what the mechanism(s) are in driving these variations, based on permanent plot data.

Dr Lan is looking forward to more field campaigns ahead and hopefully some answers to her research questions backed by extensive field data, UBD said.

The Brunei Times