We are thrilled to announce our return to action! In November our team embarked on an expedition to the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) project with Imperial College London, the South East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership, and the TEE Lab, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. After a prolonged hiatus due to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, we were eager to retrace our steps in the SAFE project area. Navigating through the overgrown trails proved to be a time-consuming yet invigorating process, taking us hours to cut through and reopen the trail to our long-forgotten sites. The SAFE project is one of the world’s largest ecological experiments in investigating the impacts of forest degradation. Taking advantage of a planned conversion of forest to oil palm, the study is designed to understand how forest ecosystems are affected by human pressure and examines what happens when a forest is logged and then fragmented. Our current plans will hopefully see us return to the SAFE project in early 2024 to resurvey our previous sites to see how dung beetles and mammals have responded to the gradual recovery of the site since the salvage logging took place in 2015-2016 and the camp was abandoned in 2019 during the Covid pandemic, combined with the impacts of African swine fever which wiped out most of the wild pigs in the area. We have also been busy re-sampling our long-term sites in Malua forest reserve, Danum Valley, and Borneo Rainforest Lodge (BRL) to monitor changes over time in dung beetle populations.
Back in the laboratory at the Danum Valley Studies Centre, we sorted and identified the collected dung beetle specimens to species level. Four research assistants joined the identification session for capacity building, utilizing our dung beetle guidebook—a result of years of dedicated fieldwork of our team in the lowland forests of Sabah. This guidebook describes 66 dung beetle species in 14 genera. Together we learned to identify these remarkable creatures based on their distinct characteristics and colorations. After five days of intensive sorting work, we successfully completed the identification process. We’ll be back in 2024 for more dung beetle surveys – watch this space!!
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