Kampar Peninsula in Sumatera Island is an excellent example of tropical peatland ecosystem which is highly degraded, drained and converted into other Land uses. This region represents 30% of peatland ecosystems in Indonesia, and the potential of carbon released from the forest region is huge.

In his two years at the TU Dresden, Arief Wijaya will establish a standard method for peat dome volume predictions as the basis for below ground biomass estimation, applying remote sensing and spatial data analysis: “I am very happy to receive Humboldt fellowship, and hopefully I can do something for the next two years during my fellowship to support tropical forest regions for conserving their peatland areas that contain high abundance of carbon stocks and have an important role for global carbon cycle.

To achieve these objectives, Arief Wijaya will apply multidisciplinary approach, namely remote sensing methods (i.e. polarimetry SAR and PolinSAR techniques) which is integrated with individual based model to study the dynamics of peatland forests and the connection between peat characteristics and dominant tree species over the study area. The connections between biomass and carbon stocks, forest stand structure and parameters, peatland hidrology and land cover/land use map over the area may provide clear descriptions about the behaviour of tropical peatlands, which is relatively unknown.

Kampar Peninsula with its extremely unique peatlands ecosystems has potentials to store and/or sequester huge amounts of carbon to the atmosphere. Poor forest monitoring and management, coupled with excessive forest conversion into oil palm and acacia plantations have accelerated forest degradation and deforestation in this region. Consequently, the role of peatlands over Kampar Peninsula changes from a carbon sink into a source. The study results will provide reliable information on carbon stocks over the Kampar Peninsula, which is required by the authorities for supporting sustainable forest management policies. Ongoing work at TU-Dresden is to accurately model gap dynamics, succession, and disturbance regimes of tropical wetlands, and they have been conducting research since 1996 on the development of Individual Based Model (IBM) approach. Continuous peat conversions and deforestation in Kampar Peninsula have resulted in drained and degraded peats that release a huge number of CO2 into the atmosphere and increase the vulnerability to forest fire. Provided that Riau Province contributes to 56% of total Indonesian peatlands, the Kampar Peninsula peatlands play an important role for carbon cycle, both at national and regional scopes. Moreover, there are significant gaps in our understanding regarding the role of tropical peatland to global carbon cycle, due to high variability and spatial distribution of this particular ecosystem. This research project of Arief Wijaya offers a feasible solution to map the spatial distribution of peatland ecosystems at global scale, which ultimately can support in mitigating current issues of global warming.

Further Information:
Prof. Dr. Uta Berger
Professorship in Forest Biometrics and Forest System Analysis
Tel.: + 49 (0) 35203 3831892

www.forst.tu-dresden.de 

1. Februar 2011