RACE AGAINST TIME: Sarah (right) and Samsir Laimun, the local field assistant.

03/08/2011 (Borneo Post) - Sarah Scriven, a researcher presently conducting a study on frogs at the Danau Girang Field Centre here, shared that there is a paucity of knowledge in the tropics, especially in Southeast Asia where there are over 1,000 native amphibian species. Unfortunately, time is running out for researchers and the likes of Sarah, who are keen on learning more about the species.

Amphibians, she said, are among the most threatened of all vertebrate taxa due to their extreme sensitivity to environmental changes.

She said that 43 per cent of species were declining, and that habitat loss was the primary cause.

Over the past 25 years, 122 extinctions have been recorded.

“Among tropical regions, Southeast Asia has suffered one of the highest rates of deforestation. The remaining landscapes consist of highly fragmented secondary forest interspersed between plantations,” she said.

She sought to explain the correlations between habitat associations and community composition in human altered landscapes in her paper entitled ‘Conservation of Anuran Communities in secondary forest and oil palm plantations in Borneo’, which was shared with visitors at the centre recently.

“My objective is to determine whether the different habitat types will support different anuran communities and whether the anuran communities will be influenced by structural habitat characteristics.

“Landscape attributes are also included in the study to see whether it influences anuran communities,” she said.

The study focuses on three habitat types: oil palm plantations, forest and forest edges.

Her studies so far has found that the secondary forest in the Kinabatangan region has maintained a high proportion of anuran diversity and that anuran assemblages are influenced by habitat quality.

She also concluded that oil palm plantation offers little conservation value for endemic forest specialists and that large and continuous plantations are more likely to act as barriers to gene flow, recolonisation and dispersal.

However, she added that plantations containing a mosaic of older and younger trees, with adequate forest corridors may offer more conservation value.