Several months have passed since our last update, as Rimba’s researchers have been quietly but feverishly slogging away. Conservation’s not all fun and games – a lot of it is also spent sitting in front of a computer! To make up for our long silence, this particular update features a bonanza of our latest publication efforts (download instructions further below in red). Our conservation scientists are nothing if not prolific!
First up, we’d like to introduce the newest member of the bunch – Lahiru Wijedasa from Sri Lanka (find out more about him on our Researchers page). Lahiru is now our team’s resident botanist and has recently published two papers – one on how to improve peat swamp mapping in Sundaland (in the open access journal Remote Sensing), and another on a new species of the plant family he specialises in – Memecylaceae (in the journal Phytotaxa).
Xingli is currently back in the US but he’s been keeping busy and has a new offering, also on Sundaland peat swamps but specifically focusing on their endemic fish denizens. He’s found that if peat swamp conversion continues at current rates, we might end up losing 16 species of fish, globally. His predictions are published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Also, both Xingli and Reuben collaborated with Norman Lim to produce a paper in Mammalian Biology predicting the occurrence of the Sunda Colugo (Galeopterus variegatus, also known as flying lemur) in Singapore.
Meanwhile, Reuben and Siong Kiat have written a feature article on their Kenyirus sodhii paper for the Malaysian Nature Society‘s popular magazine Malaysian Naturalist.
And finally, Ahimsa is a co-author on an interesting (and timely!) paper in Biological Conservation on the importance of communicating biodiversity conservation to the wider (non-scientific) public – plus suggestions on how to do it. Something we at Rimba fully believe in and passionately support!
Download their papers by clicking on the relevant links below:
5. Clements & Tan 2012 – Kenyirus sodhii – a tribute to a special place and conservation scientist
6. Bickford et al. 2012 – Science communication for biodiversity conservation
Till the next publication, folks! 🙂
Rimba 