Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems (EFForTS)

Background and Objective

Over the last decades, the lowlands of Jambi province in Sumatra (Indonesia) have undergone a major transformation from forests towards a cash crop-dominated landscape of rubber and oil palm plantations. EFForTS is a Collaborative Research Centre 990 funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) that investigates the ecological and socio-economic effects of such transformation based on research carried out in the Bukit Duabelas and Hutan Harapan area in Jambi province focusing on smallholder systems.

Approach

In the EFForTS project, more than 160 researchers from the University of Göttingen, University of Hohenheim, Thünen-Institute and Leibniz Association in Germany and the Indonesian universities IPB University (Bogor), UNTAD (Tadulako University, Palu) and UNJA (University of Jambi) work in close cooperation, representing a wide range of disciplines including ecology, forestry, agriculture, remote sensing, economics, human geography, and cultural anthropology.

Within this context, remote sensing supports the following tasks:

• documentation of land use and land cover change in the province of Jambi, Sumatra

• assessment of structural parameters in forests and plantations using metrics that are derived based on high resolution point clouds from an airborne laser scanning campaign

• scaling-up of state and pressure indicators in forest and plantation ecosystems from the plot to the landscape level based on all available remote sensing data

Links and Downloads

official webpage at University of Göttingen: www.uni-goettingen.de/en/310995.html