Balikpapan Bay in East Kalimantan is home to an incredible variety of ecosystems: in the shallow bay waters endangered dugong feed on sea grasses and salt water crocodiles sleep; along the bay proboscis monkeys leap among mangroves thirty meters tall and Irrawaddy dolphins roam; beyond the mangroves lies the Sungai Wain Protection forest; here, the Sunda clouded leopard hunts, sun bears climb into the canopy searching for fruits and nuts, and a reintroduced population of orangutans makes their nests; but this wilderness, along with all of its myriad inhabitants, are threatened by a plan to build a bridge and road connecting the towns of Penajam and Balikpapan.

The bridge, known as Pulau Balang, would span the bay, splicing through Balang Island, cutting off the mangroves from the rainforest, and running the entire length of the western edge of the protected forest. While the direct impacts would be severe—deforestation for the road, splitting the mangrove from the rainforest, damage to the reef—researchers say that providing people easy access to the mangrove and forests will inevitably destroy them.

"The most serious threats are the indirect ones, notably opening an uncontrollable access to the whole area," Stanislav Lhota, a primatologist with the University of South Bohemia, told mongabay.com.

Map showing proposed road and bridge and shorter alternative (larger image at the end of the article). Image courtesy of Stanislav Lhota.

The project "will open access for settlements, farming, illegal logging, more land speculation, subsequent forest fires, poaching of wildlife, illegal logging. In effect it will cause the destruction of the mangrove area and all wildlife there, but also (slow but certain) destruction of the western side of the Sungai Wain forest," Dr. Gabriella Fredriksson says. Fredriksson, an expert on sun bears, has worked on managing and conserving the Sungai Wain Protection Forest for over a decade.

"The destruction of the mangroves will also impact the fragile marine wildlife in the [Balikpapan] bay and fisheries due to destruction of fish breeding areas," adds Dr. Danielle Kreb of the local NGO RASI, who has studied the marine mammals in Balikpapan Bay for several years and noticed that the Irrawaddy dolphins’ core habitat is in the vicinity of Pulau Balang.

Despite the clear environmental impact outlined by conservationists, the provincial and federal governments support the project. Local governments, however, have signalled over the past couple months that they oppose the project, especially since there is an alternative plan that would threaten none of the ecosystems, and in addition provide a far shorter route between Penajam to Balikpapan.

A lost wilderness?

Sungai Wain protected forest. Photo by: Marian Bartos.

If the Pulau Bridge project goes ahead, Balikpapan Bay will be forever changed. The already shallow bay will face erosion and sedimentation from construction work on the surrounding hills, making the bay less accessible for large boats and leading to more frequent flooding of the coastal villages. Species in the bay, such as dugongs, crocodiles, and green sea turtles—already affected by sedimentation—would likely face further impacts from pollution.

The mangroves—an ecosystem that has faced heavy losses worldwide—would be severely impacted as well. The green corridors allowing species to move between the mangrove ecosystem and the Sungai Wain protection forest will be altogether broken.

"Fauna such as proboscis monkeys and many other species cannot survive in long term in mangroves alone," Lhota explains. "They need regular access to the neighboring forest where they find numerous key resources. Mangroves alone are rather inhospitable environment with only limited food sources. If they are isolated from other forests, they may apparently survive but they will gradually turn into a lifeless stand of Rhizophora trees."

The eventual loss of the mangroves also threatens the local fishing trade since fish require the mangrove forest for breeding: the mangrove stand in question is the last place for fish in the bay to breed.

"East Kalimantan only has a small mangrove area left, because much of the mangrove area [has] already [been] converted to shrimp ponds and industry. And on Balikpapan, [this] is [the] last mangrove forest," says Ade Fadli of BEBSiC, a local conservation group.

The road connecting the bridge to Balikpapan would next pass along the western edge of the Sungai Wain forest reserve, the last major stand of dipterocarp trees along the south and central coast. While the direct impact of road building to the forest reserve would likely be minimal, the road would open the reserve to "illegal logging, land clearance, and above all, forest fires," according to Lhota.

Fire is the most significant threat to the forest. While tropical forests rarely burn under natural conditions, human impacts in Indonesia has left a scar of burning across Kalimantan. Sungai Wain contains the last unburnt primary forest in the area; in 1998 devastating fires spilled across the region, but only burnt a part of Sungai Wain.

"The [Sungai Wain] forest, which was burned only once, regenerates well but becomes highly prone to subsequent fires due to the decrease in humidity and huge quantities of highly flammable dead wood," Lhota explains. "If it burns a second time, it can no longer regenerate easily. With the current tendency of governments to consider such forest as 'lost forever', it is likely to be doomed to further encroachment and conversion."

Home to over 100 mammal species and over 250 bird species, the loss of the forest would devastate tropical species, including a population of reintroduced orangutans.

In addition, the forest is as a catchment source of clean water for the state-owned oil company Pertamina, and the Kariangau Baru industrial area. The loss of the forest would endanger the water needs of these industries, which uses it for cooling in refineries and drinking for employees.

The Sungai Wain forest "is the last watershed covered with forest and hence supplying freshwater on an ongoing basis. The water from this reserve has been used for the oil industry and its workers/households (which make up almost 20 percent of the population in Balikpapan) since 1945," Fredriksson explains.

According to Lhota, Balikpapan Bay has huge ecotourism and education potential which has largely gone untapped.

Taken from: www.mongabay.com

Oil company in Ecuador transforms indigenous community into commercial poachers, threatening wildlife in a protected area

The documentary Crude opened this weekend in New York, while the film shows the direct impact of the oil industry on indigenous groups a new study proves that the presence of oil companies can have subtler, but still major impacts, on indigenous groups and the ecosystems in which they live.

In Ecuador's Yasuni National Park—comprising 982,000 hectares of what the researchers call "one of the most species diverse forests in the world"—the presence of an oil company has disrupted the lives of the Waorani and the Kichwa peoples, and the rich abundance of wildlife living within the forest. By building a 149 kilometer (92 mile) road through the protected forest and providing subsidies to the local tribes, the oil company Maxus Ecuador Inc. transformed some members of the tribes from semi-nomadic subsistence hunters into commercial poachers.




"We’ve found that a road in a forest can bring huge social changes to local groups and the ways in which they utilize wildlife resources," said Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) researcher Esteban Suárez, lead author of the study. "Communities existing inside and around the park are changing their customs to a lifestyle of commercial hunting, the first stage in a potential overexploitation of wildlife."

According to the new study by the WCS and the IDEAS-Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, the creation of the single road allowed tribe members to transport game to a market where it is sold illegally. In addition, the subsidies and free access to the road, all provided by the oil company, make the transportation of the meat—and thereby the wild meat market itself—economically viable.

Although sale of wild meat and products in Ecuador is illegal, the researchers report that "local authorities and park rangers know about the market, [but] they lack the resources and political will to stop the illegal trade of wildlife in Pompeya, primarily to avoid conflicts with the local indigenous population."


Some communities of the Waorani tribe even abandoned their traditional semi-nomadic life and built settled villages along the road for easy transport of their game. They took up firearms (instead of the traditional blowguns), which became more prevalent following the arrival of the oil company.

"These changes," the authors explain, "are amplified by patronizing relationships in which large companies buy their right to operate in the area by providing local communities with resources, money or infrastructure without consideration of the social and ecological impact of these 'compensation plans'".

The study published in Animal Conservation found that the wild meat market appeared shortly after the road was constructed in early 1990s and free travel was given to the indigenous tribes. Between 2005 and 2007, 11,000 kilograms (24,000 pounds) of wild meat were sold at the Pompeya market every year. The amount of meat sold every day doubled between 2005 and 2007, from 150 kilograms (330 pounds) to 300 kilograms (661 pounds).

"While the magnitude of the wildlife trade occurring at Pompeya is still limited, its emergence and continuous growth are symptomatic of the dramatic changes that the area is experiencing under the influence of the oil industry and the absence of effective management and control strategies," the authors write.


Taken from: www.mongabay.com

Have Australian cane toads finally met their match?

This weekend in Queensland, Australia the government held the first 'Toad Day Out' where hundreds of locals went hunting for the invasive cane toad, catching an estimated 10,000 toads to be euthanized. At the same time, researchers announced in the journal Functional Ecology that they may have discovered a native Australian species that will finally rout the cane toad—and it's not man. The meat ant is a notoriously aggressive and abundant insect which is known to consume anything edible, including the scientists argue, cane toads.

Comparing habitat use and activity patterns of meat ants, cane toads, and seven native Australian frog species, the researchers found that the cane toad was by far the most susceptible to predation by meat ants.




"The spread of cane toads through tropical Australia has created major ecological problems. The ideal way to control toad numbers would be to find a predator that kills and eats toads but leaves native frogs alone. However, bringing in a predator from overseas might have catastrophic consequences, like those that occurred when cane toads themselves were brought in. So we've explored an alternative approach – to see if we could use a native predator," explains Dr. Rick Shine, one of the study's authors. “Meat ants are abundant around tropical waterbodies, and we often see them eating small toads, so we suspected that there might be some kind of mismatch between the invader and its newly invaded range, for example something about the toads' behaviour that makes them vulnerable to a predator that poses little danger to native frogs."

Through laboratory experiments Shine's team, known as Team Bufo (after the Latin name of the cane toad), found that both cane toads and meat ants live largely in open microhabitats and are diurnal, or active during the day. Native frogs, however, are active at night and spend their days hidden in vegetation, away from the path of the voracious meat ants. In addition, cane toads are slower than native frogs and appear to be less vigilant against meat ants: while native frogs would flee the ants, cane toads would only move a few short hops away or even bound closer. Perhaps, even more important, the meat ants were not affected by the cane toad's poison.

The next step according to researchers is to work to bring these two species together more frequently and see if results in the lab can be recreated in the field.

The story of the cane toad in Australia is a warning to anyone who thinks it wise to import species to non-native habits. A warning that has yet to be fully heeded: consider the recent difficulties in Florida with non-native burmese pythons.

Cane toads were introduced into Eastern Australia in 1935 from Hawaii, where they had been introduced from their native habitats in Central and South America. They were brought to Australia because it was believed they would help control the native cane beetle, a pest for sugarcane farmers. However, it turned out that the cane toads were not able to jump high enough to eat the cane beetles.

Instead of saving farmers, the cane toad began to devastate native wildlife. As large and slow-moving the cane toad proved an easy target for Australian predators, only the cane toad is poisonous and therefore would often kill anything that ate it, greatly affecting populations of quolls, birds, snakes, monitor lizards, and crocodiles.

Researchers have tried for decades to come up with a solution to Eastern Australia's cane toad plague, so far there has been no silver bullet.

Taken from:
Jeremy Hance
mongabay.com
March 31, 2009

Conservation groups condemn 'open and organized plundering' of Madagascar's natural resources

Eleven conservation organizations—including WWF, CI, and WCS—have banded together to condemn logging in Madagascar's world renowned parks during a time of political crisis.

Taking advantage of the turmoil after interim president Andry Rajoelina took control of the country in a bloodless coup from former president Marc Ravalomanana on March 17th, pristine forests have been plundered for valuable wood, wildlife trafficking has increased, and illegal mining operations have begun say the conservation organizations.
As reported last week by Mongabay.com, the forces involved in the logging are not just impoverished locals, but according to a local source who spoke on the condition of anonymity, 'foreign traders' and 'big businessmen'.

“[They] have arrived in local towns seeking to take advantage of the political crisis that has weakened park protection and enforcement," the source said. "This is the worst, by far, that has happened to [Marojejy] park in recent years. The situation is worse than desperate."

The lawlessness of the situation is confirmed by the conservation organizations who write that the logging is done with “open and organized plundering, sometimes using firearms, of precious wood from several natural forests, including national parks such as Marojejy and Masoala.”

The chaos has put a halt to Madagascar's tourism industry—one of the impoverished nations most important growth industries. Valued at $400-million-dollars-a-year the industry could be hurt for years to come, especially if its natural treasures are devastated.



Jeremy Hance
mongabay.com
March 30, 2009

Glaciers worldwide lost ice

Glaciers worldwide lost ice mass for the 18th consecutive year due to warming temperatures and reduce snowfall, reports the University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service.

Alpine glaciers lost on average 1.3 meters of thickness in 2006 and 0.7 meters in 2007, extending an 11.3-meter (36-foot) retreat since 1980. The pace melting has more than doubled since the 1990s.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service has tracked the status of 30 glaciers in nine mountain ranges since 1980, but monitors 80 to 100 today. There are 150,000 to 200,000 glaciers worldwide.

Glaciers are melting particularly quickly in the Alps. The most extensive melt recorded for reference glaciers in 2007 was Careser in the Italian Alps.

By some estimates 80 percent of the glaciers in the Alps may disappear by the end of the century, while Africa's glaciers could be gone by 2025.

The environmental consequences of melting glaciers are significant. Glaciers store massive amounts of water and their disappearance puts water supplies and agriculture in many regions at risk. Further, glacial melt is the largest contributor to rising sea levels according to a study published in Science in July 2007.





From

http://news.mongabay.com/