Social Forestry Development Project

A few details on some recent posts about West Kalimantan (see Hedda and Ernst and Provisions). The Social Forestry Development Project, or SFDP, (map shown above) was the GTZ project that Ernst Kuester was team leader of and with which I worked for several years. Community management of an old logging concession containing over 102,000 hectares. Fifty-eight Dayak villages and four different languages (not dialects). Dark green areas on the map are intact Dipterocarp hill forest. That needed to be inventoried and described. Which is where I came in.

Satellite image of the SFDP site is shown above. Red squares are the 70 inventory plot clusters that we located throughout the area in a stratified, random fashion (see Global Positioning System). Recorded 455 tree species and compiled a massive database (1419 entries) of plant uses. Incredible amount of work. Great fun. [NOTE: I was walking through the forests of interior Borneo with Dayaks counting and measuring trees almost 20 years ago. This project was visionary (thx, Ernst)].