The Danum Valley Conservation Area

The Sabah Biodiversity Experiment is located about 10km north of the Danum Valley Conservation Area, which includes within it the Danum Valley Field Centre, where the scientists involved in the project are likely to be based.

The Danum Valley Conservation Area is approximately 43,800ha (slightly smaller than Singapore) of largely undisturbed primary lowland dipterocarp forest, which used to cover most of Borneo, Sumatra and Java. It is surrounded by an area of approximately 850,000ha of forest that has been logged in a known sequence between 1961 and 2001. Both Danum Valley and Maliau Basin are within the Yayasan Sabah (Sabah Foundation) Forest Management Area.

The Danum Valley Field Centre was established in 1985 between the Royal Society's South-East Asia Rainforest Research Programme and a number of Malaysian institutions. It is funded by Yayasan Sabah, and managed by Innoprise. Danum Valley is classified as a class 1 conservation area.

The field centre is internationally recognised as one of the world's leading tropical forest research centres, and more than 90 students (about half of which are Sabahans) have graduated with MSc and PhD research projects that were based there. The Royal Society funds 9 research assistants there. Through the links with Yayasan Sabah, it has a direct input to forest management. Some of the work that takes place at the field centre includes:

1. Basic research on diversity; what is there? There are perhaps a total of 400,000 species of flora and fauna in Danum Valley. At least 100,000 species of beetle; 150 species of butterfly; 342 species of birds; 70 species of reptile; 7,000 species of moth, and 7,000 or 8,000 species of plants, including about 100 species of tree per hectare (the UK only has about 30 species of tree in total).
2. How does the forest work? For example, how does it react to disturbance?
3. How can the forest be managed sustainably?