HSBC Singapore Collaboration with CTFS-NIE Moves to Phase II

HSBC volunteers with CTFS Research Assistant Ngo Kang Min (right).

by Ngo Kang Min

HSBC Singapore volunteers, in collaboration with CTFS and the National Institute of Education (NIE), have completed the first phase of a forest carbon survey.

The project, a long-term study of the accumulation of carbon in forest trees, will continue in 2011 with the second phase moving to the MacRitchie Reservoir, a primary forest adjacent to the secondary forest in which the first phase was conducted.

HSBC Singapore has donated S$45,000 for the second phase of the carbon survey, which will monitor more than 500 trees in the designated plots. HSBC Climate Champions and staff will continue to be engaged in the field, from putting dendrometer bands on trees to collecting leaf samples.

An HSBC volunteer tags a tree.

This project complements the global HSBC Climate Partnership, where dendrometer bands have been installed in more than 10 sites in the CTFS network, including Bukit Timah in Singapore. This study will enable comparisons between the coastal hill forest of Bukit Timah and the lowland forest of MacRitchie. Carbon stock differences in primary and secondary forests at the two sites will also be examined for a better understanding of carbon sequestration in a matrix of multiple forest communities.

HSBC Volunteers Working with CTFS in Singapore on Climate Change

Non-scientists actively contributing to science—that is what Climate Champions from HSBC are doing in Singapore. This 10-week program is a collaboration between CTFS and HSBC-Singapore. More than 100 HSBC staff are tagging trees, putting dendrometer bands on trees to measure growth, and collecting leaf samples for species identification. The work is being done in forests surrounding MacRitchie Reservoir in Singapore. The program started with just 9 volunteers in the first session and has grown to 23 at the latest session on 11 November 2010.

This study complements the ongoing research done in Bukit Timah Nature Reserve (BTNR), where CTFS researchers have installed 1500 dendrometers as a part of their study to understand the response of forests to climate change. BTNR has mostly hilly terrain, while the MacRitchie site is flat, and each site has a different suite of species. The main objectives of this program are to compare carbon stock differences between the two reserves, and also to create greater awareness within HSBC about climate change issues.

Students Study Secondary Forest Succession in Panama Canal Watershed

by Dylan Craven

Enmeshed in a mosaic of land uses, young secondary forests provide vital ecosystem services to the cities of Panama City, San Miguelito, and Colón, as well as to the Panama Canal. Under the auspices of the Agua Salud Project, a collaborative research project of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute sponsored by the HSBC Climate Partnership, a group of students from Yale and Harvard spent the summer investigating plant functional traits, functional diversity, and community assembly processes in the young secondary forests of the Panama Canal Watershed.

An extensive series of 0.10 ha transects (10 ha in total) has been established across this human-dominated landscape, where all trees, lianas, and palms have been inventoried yearly since 2008 (~450 tree species, ~150 liana species). Using demographic information from these transects, Dylan Craven (Yale F&ES), Grant Tolley (Yale F&ES), and Julian Moll-Rocek (Harvard) identified and sampled 56 of the most abundant tree species, which represent approximately 75% of basal area of transects between 0 and 20 years old. By looking at varying aspects of species-specific plant function – leaf morphology, physiology, and nutrient content – in combination with abundance and mortality data, these students hope to gain insights about how habitat filtering, niche differentiation, and functional diversity vary with secondary succession.

For more information, please contact Dylan Craven at dylan.craven@yale.edu.

Videos of Harvard Talks Now Online

Videos of the presentations at the Arnold Arboretum-CTFS Harvard Plant Biology Symposium in April are now available online for viewing at
http://arboretum.harvard.edu/research/center-for-tropical-forest-science-arnold-arboretum-asia-program/pbi/.

Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) in partnership with the CTFS-Arnold Arboretum (CTFS-AA) program hosted the 6th Annual Harvard Plant Biology Symposium. This year's theme was "Trees and the Global Environment." The symposium was supported by CTFS-AA, OEB, and the HSBC Climate Partnership.

The talks represented both empirical and modeling/theory perspectives from diverse disciplines in plant science and resource economics. Presentations ranged from the functional responses of individual trees to changing environmental conditions all the way up to ecosystem and landscape-scale responses. For more information, please visit: http://www.pbi.fas.harvard.edu/events.htm.

Planting Trees to Celebrate World Environment Day 2010

by Jefferson Hall

The headlines are not good. A massive oil spill continues to foul the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and negotiations to curb the increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are in disarray. However, on World Environment Day 2010, we remembered the old environmental movement call to action “Think Globally, Act Locally.”

Photo: HSBC volunteers in Panama joined STRI and the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) on World Environment Day (5 June) to plant 2,500 trees over 2 hectares of land in Soberania National Park, Panama. HSBC-Panama CEO Ernesto Fernandes (center) and Arturo Cerezo (green shirt) from ACP were among the volunteers. Photo by Gian Montufar, STRI.

Despite the headlines and daunting environmental challenges the world faces, we need to remember that global action to address environmental problems starts with individuals and local groups. So on World Environment Day, we chose to do our part for the environment by planting trees. Our partners in the effort were 125 HSBC Bank employees in Panama.

As part of the Agua Salud Project—an ecosystem services research partnership between the Panama Canal Authority, the National Environmental Authority of Panama, HSBC Bank, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI)—we enjoyed a day outdoors, doing something positive for the environment. To help control the spread of aggressive invasive canal grass (Saccharum spontaneum) and restore tropical forest within the boundaries of Soberania National Park, we planted 2,500 trees of native species over 2 hectares of land.

Will it work? No one can tell for sure, but in a six-year-old forest planted by STRI’s PRORENA project, we’ve seen the return of countless species of birds, species of primates, and even footprints of a very large cat believed to be a Jaguar—none of which would be there without the forest.

Harvard Symposium Focuses on Trees and the Global Environment

Last week, the 6th Annual Harvard Plant Biology Symposium drew a crowd of several hundred people to hear (in Cambridge and via the Web) a multidisciplinary group of researchers present some of today’s most advanced science and social science related to trees and the global environment.

The symposium was co-organized and hosted by the Harvard University Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and CTFS-Arnold Arboretum with support from the HSBC Climate Partnership. See Alvin Powell’s article in the Harvard Gazette for a summary of the symposium. Videos of the talks are available online for viewing at http://arboretum.harvard.edu/research/pbi.html.

HSBC Climate Partnership yields initial research findings

Researchers from around the world met last week at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama to present mid-term research results from the HSBC Climate Partnership, a five-year initiative to identify and respond to the impacts of climate change. The program is supported financially by HSBC and involves a global team of bank employees—“climate champions”—in vital forest research.

The following content from the conference is available online:

Videos of conference presentations
Conference program
The video Forests and Climate Change: A Global Investigation

The first-ever research program of its kind has so far:
• Found rapid increases in tree growth in the forest around the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Maryland, USA, a finding that corresponds to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and longer growing seasons, published in PNAS.
• Proposed a novel biodiversity theory relating stress and seed-size published in PNAS.
• Examined the effects a changing climate in forests is having on white-tailed deer, mice and even mosquitoes.
• Addressed the lack of a reliable method for estimating the carbon storage capability of secondary forests on a landscape scale by assessing how measurements from airborne LiDAR and other remote sensing technologies relate to ground-based measurements.
• Reviewed how human disturbance changes the way forests take up carbon in diverse environments.

Researchers working in broadleaf-forest plots near Oxford, UK, Atlantic rainforests in southern Brazil, and warm-temperate forests near Gutianshan Nature Reserve in China, as well as the SERC site in Maryland, have been putting HSBC employees to work. At Oxford, for example, data collected indicates that changes in forest structure have impacted moth populations.
Stuart Davies, director of the Smithsonian and Harvard’s Center for Tropical Forest Science, says, “We know that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shot up from 280 to 385 parts per million since the 1850s as a result of human activities like the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. The degree to which atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to increase depends, in part, on how trees respond to climate and atmospheric change—whether forests end up storing more or less carbon. This is what the HSBC Climate Partnership research is trying to establish.”

Dan Bebber, head of climate change research at Earthwatch Institute, says, “Human activities are undeniably changing the world’s climate, but the effects of that change on forest ecosystems and the role that forests play in providing ecosystem services such as carbon storage are poorly understood. The research being supported by funding and climate champions from HSBC will help to increase our knowledge of forests, and how they can be wisely managed for the future. This unique NGO-corporate partnership is an exemplary model of how individuals and businesses can make a difference.”

STRI staff scientist Helene Muller-Landau said: “The HSBC Climate Champions working with us to measure trees understand how to take stock of carbon balances. Trees take up carbon as they grow. As trees die and decompose, they release carbon. The balance of carbon flows in and out of the forest determines whether the total forest carbon stock increases or decreases over time.”

“Dangerous and irreversible changes that threaten life-support systems are likely when atmospheric carbon levels reach 550 ppm, if not sooner,” stressed Yavinder Malhi, research scientist from Oxford University. “It’s our job to engage people in science in a way that balances keeping things simple while showing that forests, as living systems, may be really complicated, taking up carbon under some conditions and giving off carbon under other conditions.”

Research in Peru reveals how forest carbon budgets change with temperature from cooler mountainous sites to warmer lowland sites. Muller-Landau and Malhi agree that because different tree species respond differently to changing temperatures and rainfall regimes, some species will thrive while others will decline, resulting in changes in forest tree-species composition and probably in carbon stocks.

Another important topic of discussion at the conference was the HSBC-sponsored Panama Canal Watershed Experiment, nicknamed the Agua Salud Project. This huge experiment aims to determine how different land uses—pasture, plantations of native trees and teak, and mature forest—affect carbon storage, water flow, and biodiversity on the narrow Isthmus of Panama, where two great biodiversity hotspots meet. STRI Director Eldredge Bermingham noted “that locating this experiment on the banks of the Panama Canal aims to focus global attention on the ecosystem services that forests provide this critical commercial waterway.”

Ilha do Cardoso 10-ha plot established in Brazil

Text contributed by Julia Stuart and Alberto Vicentini

Under the guidance of Alexandre de Oliveira, students from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and technicians from Cananéia, Brazil, recently completed the first CTFS census of the 10-ha Ilha do Cardoso plot in Brazil. The plot was originally established in 2000/2004-05, with a DBH minimum of 4.78 cm, as one of four 10-ha plots in the project Parcelas Permanente São Paulo (PPSP, BIOTA-FAPESP) to study the Atlantic, restinga, semideciduous, and cerradão forest types that occur in São Paulo State.

In 2008, Ilha do Cardoso joined the CTFS network with the inauguration of a census to include all trees ≥ 1 cm. The census catalogued four new species (Rubiaceae) not enumerated in 2000/2004-05, bringing the plot total to 106 species and approximately 40,000 trees.

The plot is located in restinga forest in Ilha do Cardoso State Park on the extreme south coast of São Paulo State near the city of Cananéia. The mountainous island is approximately 22,500 ha and was made a state park in 1962. Despite nutrient-poor and water-stressed sandy soils, the forest shows high diversity. At 22°S latitude, Ilha do Cardoso is the southernmost plot in the CTFS network.

Funding from the HSBC Climate Partnership supported the census, and many research projects at Ilha do Cardoso are being coordinated by the Laboratório de Ecologia de Florestas Tropicais at USP.

China climate center welcomes citizen scientists

The opening of China’s Regional Climate Centre, the newest of five international sites where HSBC bank volunteers (called “Climate Champions”) work alongside scientists to study the effects of climate change on forests, was celebrated at Gutianshan Nature Reserve, China, on 22 September 2009. The HSBC Climate Partnership—a collaboration between HSBC, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Earthwatch Institute, WWF, and The Climate Group—has four other Regional Climate Centers in India, Brazil, the US, and the UK.

Earthwatch and the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences host HSBC Climate Champions (kneeling above) at Gutianshan Nature Reserve in eastern China, where they measure tree growth and litter production using techniques developed by CTFS.

In 2005, Dr. Ma Keping (below left, with Teresa Au of HSBC) and colleagues established a long-term 24-ha forest-monitoring site in warm-temperate evergreen forest at Gutianshan as part of the Chinese Forest Biodiversity Monitoring Network, a partner network of the Center for Tropical Forest Science.