Response of Asian Rainforest Ecosystems to Global Change

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Tropical rain forests in Borneo Island support amazing amount of biomass with fast turnover of phytoproduction and tree species diversity. This type of forest ecosystem is experiencing the immense human impact, responding quickly to changing climate and land use. It is thus particularly important to monitor the changing process of tropical rain forests along the purpose of projecting ecosystem change in response to climatic change. This program monitored typical foothill dipterocarp mixed forest, lowland heath forest, and lowland freshwater peat swamp forest in West and Central Kalimantan, and Brunei. Demographic and ecosystem processes were intensively monitored in permanent research plots set across these forest types.Based on demographic data of mixed dipterocarp forest in Serimbu, West Kalimantan, we proposed a simulation model describing forest structure dynamics in gap-mosaic landscape, that satisfactorily projected the present landscape architecture of forests. Similar model was applied to describe different forest types. The monitored heath forest in Lahei, Central Kalimantan, showed that dense bole-class layer of the forest compared to mixed dipetrocarp forest was not due to the depression of growth at this stage but high upgrowth and rapid recruitment, because the depression by poor nutrient was only for canopy stage trees. As a result, the biomass turnover(biomass divided by net primary production)was just the same between heath forest and mixed dipterocarp forest, which has two times larger biomass. Repeated recensuses of tree trunk girth efficiently recorded temporary variation of production. Reduction of biomass increment after 1997 El Nino was particularly obvious. Further continuation will give us essential information to relate forest ecosystem functioning and environmental change.