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News from the Jambi Site: The end of another forest myth?

Dipterocarps are the hallmark trees of Southeast Asia, with their centre of origin and highest diversity on the island of Borneo. Many of them go by the trade name ‘meranti’, and have been an important basis for the logging industry. Dipterocarps are known to be dependent on ectomycorrhiza, in a symbiotic relationship between fungi and tree roots. Research in the 1980’s on Kalimantan showed that the fungus part of this relationship is sensitive to forest conversion. Once the forest is gone, the right fungi disappear from the soil and it is hard for meranti seedlings to grow. Foresters can overcome this constraint by inoculating trees in the nursery and spores of selected fungi are now available in tablet form. The Indonesian bureau of standards prescribes the use of such tablets. You need to be a professional forester to save the forests with advanced technology. New research in Sumatra, in the Jambi benchmark of the CIFOR-ICRAF Landscape Mosaics project and CIAT-TSBF Sustainable Management of Belowground Biodiversity has cast doubt on all this. On December 15 2008 Made Hesti Lestari Tata successfully defended her PhD Thesis “Mycorrhizae on dipterocarps in rubber agroforests (RAF) in Sumatra” at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The main result of her research is that there are no major soil biological constraints to the use of Dipterocarps in enrichment planting, as rapidly available fungi can form effective ectomycorrhiza. Even in soil exposed to heat in an oven (1 hour above 100 ^OC, much more than any forest fire achieves), meranti seedlings will find spores to partner with in forming mycorrhiza. The standard ectomycorrhiza tablet gave a small positive effect on tree growth in on-farm experiments, enriching rubber gardens with meranti, but the fungus used could not be found back on the young trees and trees without inoculant in fact did well. With current DNA-based taxonomy, a group of fungi previously hardly known but with effective spore dispersal by air, is seen to be the main partners for the trees – at least in Sumatra. Further research will have to check whether the forest soils and Dipterocarps of Borneo differ from those of Sumatra – or whether the story of the sensitive fungi is a ‘myth’ in the centre of origin as well. The good news is that it isn’t difficult for farmers to add valuable timber trees to their rubber agroforests – if only they could be sure that they will be allowed to harvest them in future without being caught as illegal logger. Dr. Hesti will return to the Indonesian Forestry Research and Development Organization (FORDA) in Bogor. Her thesis can be downloaded from:

http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2008-1203-201249/UUindex.html

Looking Beyond the Forests to Save Them – Livelihoods and Biodiversity in Multifunctional Landscapes

As more of the world’s forests rapidly disappear and become increasingly fragmented, conservation efforts have focused on establishing protected areas to conserve these key ecosystems that support a diverse array of flora and fauna. More recently, conservationists and scientists have observed that protected areas are necessary but not sufficient for the conservation of biodiversity. In this context, the role of multifunctional landscape mosaics, especially those surrounding protected areas, has become increasingly important.

http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/Highlights/biodiversity_platform.htm