Michael Padmanaba

Local perceptions of climate variability and change in tropical forests of Papua, Indonesia

People everywhere experience changes and events that impact their lives. Knowing how they perceive, react, and adapt to climatic changes and events is helpful in developing strategies to support adaptation to climate change. Mamberamo in Papua, Indonesia, is a sparsely populated watershed of 7.8 million hectares possessing rich tropical forests. Our study compares scientific and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) on climate, and analyzes how local people in Mamberamo perceive and react to climatic variations. We compared meteorological data for the region with local views gathered through focus group discussions and interviews in six villages. We explored the local significance of seasonality, climate variability, and climate change. Mamberamo is subject to strikingly low levels of climatic variation; nonetheless local people highlighted certain problematic climate-related events such as floods and droughts. As our results illustrate, the implications vary markedly among villages. People currently consider climate variation to have little impact on their livelihoods when contrasted with other factors, e.g., logging, mining, infrastructure development, and political decentralization. Nonetheless, increased salinity of water supplies, crop loss due to floods, and reduced hunting success are concerns in specific villages. To gain local engagement, adaptation strategies should initially focus on factors that local people already judge important. Based on our results we demonstrate that TEK, and an assessment of local needs and concerns, provide practical insights for the development and promotion of locally relevant adaptation strategies. These insights offer a foundation for further engagement.

Falling Back on Forests: How Forest-Dwelling People Cope with Catastrophe in a Changing Landscape

SUMMARY How do tropical forest people cope with natural disasters? We worked with four communities in East Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia, before and after a catastrophic flood. We interviewed 42 of 102 heads of households affected by the floods. All 42 households suffered some major loss of property — crops, lands, houses, and/or livestock. Each household adopted one or more coping strategies: increasing their reliance on forest resources; seeking paid employment; relocating their houses; and finding temporary land to establish their crops in upland areas. Immediate reliance on the forest was greatest for those most heavily impacted, the poorest, the least well educated, and those with the easiest access. Overall, those with the fewest resources and alternatives made most use of the forest. But access to such forest benefits is becoming increasingly difficult. The often crucial value of forests to local forest-dwellers needs to be better recognized in the context of current developments. These forest derived safety-values should be maintained or — where necessary — substituted.

Spread of the invasive alien species Piper aduncum via logging roads in Borneo.

We examine how spiked pepper (Piper aduncum L., Piperaceae), a shade intolerant, animal-dispersed Neotropical tree, is spreading in the interior of Borneo. Concerned that logging roads might be facilitating this spread, we made a series of observations, relating tree distribution, location and road history, in a concession in East Kalimantan. These roads will connect West Kutai and Malinau Districts and may allow alien plants to disperse from one to the other. We observed that P. aduncum was already well established on the oldest, southern portions of the logging road network, but was absent on the newest roads to the north. A few scattered individuals occur on the roadside as much as 150 km beyond the main areas dominated by P. aduncum, suggesting an occasional ability to achieve long-hop dispersal. Rivers of 30 m width are not a barrier to P. aduncums spread. Based on road age, we estimate a minimum rate of spread between five and seven km per year. We infer that logging roads are assisting P. aduncum to spread and the tree will become widely established in Malinau District. Prevention of this spread would require urgent, intensive and coordinated control over the length of the road network and, more generally, major restrictions on how such roads are located and managed.

Evolutionary Comparisons of the Chloroplast Genome in Lauraceae and Insights into Loss Events in the Magnoliids

Abstract Available plastomes of the Lauraceae show similar structure and varied size, but there has been no systematic comparison across the family. In order to understand the variation in plastome size and structure in the Lauraceae and related families of magnoliids, we here compare 47 plastomes, 15 newly sequenced, from 27 representative genera. We reveal that the two shortest plastomes are in the parasitic Lauraceae genus Cassytha, with lengths of 114,623 (C. filiformis) and 114,963 bp (C. capillaris), and that they have lost NADH dehydrogenase (ndh) genes in the large single-copy region and one entire copy of the inverted repeat (IR) region. The plastomes of the core Lauraceae group, with lengths from 150,749 bp (Nectandra angustifolia) to 152,739 bp (Actinodaphne trichocarpa), have lost trnI-CAU, rpl23, rpl2, a fragment of ycf2, and their intergenic regions in IRb region, whereas the plastomes of the basal Lauraceae group, with lengths from 157,577 bp (Eusideroxylon zwageri) to 158,530 bp (Beilschmiedia tungfangensis), have lost rpl2 in IRa region. The plastomes of Calycanthus (Calycanthaceae, Laurales) have lost rpl2 in IRb region, but the plastome of Caryodaphnopsis henryi (Lauraceae) remain intact, as do those of the nonLaurales magnoliid genera Piper, Liriodendron, and Magnolia. On the basis of our phylogenetic analysis and structural comparisons, different loss events occurred in different lineages of the Laurales, and fragment loss events in the IR regions have largely driven the contraction of the plastome in the Lauraceae. These results provide new insights into the evolution of the Lauraceae as well as the magnoliids as a whole.

Alien plant invasions of protected areas in Java, Indonesia

Alien plants are invading protected areas worldwide, but there is little information from tropical Asia. Java has the longest record of human occupation in Asia and today supports 145 m people. Remnants of natural ecosystems survive in 12 small National Parks surrounded by dense human populations, making them highly vulnerable to invasions. We surveyed eight of these, along a rainfall gradient from lowland rainforest with >3000 mm annual rainfall to savanna with <1500 mm, and a 0–3158 m altitudinal gradient, using 403 10 × 5 m plots along trails. We found 67 invasive alien plant species, of which 33 occurred in only one park and two (Chromolaena odorata and Lantana camara) in all. Historical factors relating to plant introduction appeared to be as important as environmental factors in determining which species occurred in which park, while within parks canopy cover and altitude were generally most influential. Spread away from trails was only evident in open habitats, including natural savannas in Baluran National Park, threatened by invasion of Acacia nilotica. Existing control attempts for invasive aliens are reactive, localized, and intermittent, and insufficient resources are currently available for the early detection, prompt action, and continued monitoring that are needed.

The evolving role of tropical forests for local livelihoods in Indonesia

The authors studied how the role and perceptions of natural forests have changed in seven villages along the Malinau River, East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Local people consider development projects, logging and mining activities, and floods as having the greatest influence on their livelihoods and use of forests. Access to and availability of valued forest products is perceived to have decreased and thus, while still of considerable importance, the overall role of forests has declined. New sources of income,