Postdoctoral Research Associate, Katie Spencer, has been in Indonesian Borneo for 2 months, working with partners at Universitas Mulawarman to collect more socio-ecological data for DICE’s Defaunation Hub. She has been camera-trapping, organising household questionnaires on wild meat & teaching students how to use R for ecological analyses. Below, she shares a few highlights from her experiences.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to spend the past two months in Indonesian Borneo, collecting data for the Defaunation Hub and working closely with our partners at Universitas Mulawarman and associate Dr Namrata Anirudh.
The trip kicked off with fieldwork in Lesan Protection Forest—a remote site that took a very long (and very bumpy!) 16-hour car ride from our base in Samarinda to reach. We spent over two weeks working with a team from the local village to deploy 35 camera traps throughout the forest. This meant travelling down rivers by boat and setting up fly camps with just our hammocks deeper in the forest. The terrain was extremely tough, but the forest was beautiful and I have high hopes for lots of wildlife on the cameras – we will find out in three months when they are collected in!
Once back in Samarinda, we jumped straight into running R workshops for undergraduate forestry students and gave a few guest lectures in department seminars. Finally, we finished the trip by training social science students to carry out household surveys – data collection will commence in a couple of weeks. These extra surveys will contribute to our growing database on wild meat consumption, hunting practices, and forest use across Kalimantan.
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We can’t wait to hear more about Katie’s experiences and research.