The Tropical Ecology and Entomology (TEE) Lab is ecstatic to announce that we are embarking on a Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) project on “Mobilising data on ecologically important insects in Malaysia and Singapore”. Funded by the Biodiversity Information Fund for Asia (BIFA) and supported by the Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan (MOEJ), this project will be spearheaded by TEE Lab's PI, Dr. Eleanor Slade.
For over a decade, advancing our understanding of the impact of land-use changes in Southeast Asia on biodiversity, particularly insects, has been the research focus of our team. The study of Dung beetles (Scarabaeidae) - the focal taxa of this project - has contributed much to these studies. Not only do they act as bioindicators of habitat disturbance, the dung of mammal species of which they rely, many of them elusive, provides an indication of their abundance and presence. Also key is their natural ability to serve as ecosystem engineers through their support of the functioning of many ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, soil bioturbation, seed dispersal, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and biological control of parasite transmission for both wildlife and humans.
Considering their ecological and scientific value, existing GBIF-mediated data (as of 2021) retains poor representation of the dung beetles of Southeast Asia, in which this project aims to rectify. Aligned with the objectives of GBIF's December 2020 call, this project intends to increase knowledge of Dung Beetles of Singapore and Bornean Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) by mobilising georeferenced occurrence records from existing literature and collection specimens and generating DNA barcode sequences for species.
Over the next sixteen months, species checklists, distribution records, sequence data and meta-data datasets will be outputted along with the creation of user-friendly keys and guides. This data will be open-access and made freely available for all to build capacity among regional stakeholders to prepare for a future in academic research and citizen science where dung beetles are easily identifiable and will be widely encouraged for use as bioindicators and for other ecological studies.
This project is one of twelve projects being funded by the BIFA programme in 2021 and is supported by the Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan (MOEJ). This project will be led by TEE Lab's PI, Dr. Eleanor Slade and managed by Project Officer Marx Yim with PhD student Ong Xin Rui. Our collaborators include Ang Yu Chen (Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, Singapore), Arthur Chung (Forest Research Centre, Sabah), Maria Heikkilä (Finnish Museum of Natural History, Luomus), Heidi Viljanen (Department of Environmental Science, University of Helsinki), and Monica Suleiman (Borneensis, Universiti Malaysia Sabah).