contacts: email:kaydee.naau@gmail.com
Only after the last tree has been cut down Only after the last river has been poisoned Only after the last fish has been caught Only then will you find that money cannot be eatenAuthor unknown
I'm Kore and I'm from the eastern half of the Island of New Guinea i.e. Papua New Guinea. I graduated from the University of Papua New Guinea with a Bachelor in Science-biology. I am currenly working on my Honours thesis with the Wildlife Conservation Society-PNG
program. My thesis is about the habitat selection of the megabat that occurs commonly on the island of New Guinea and it's reproductive patterns. I heard about the Biodiversity of Borneo Course so I applied and was selected to attend. What attracted me most were the concepts in ecology that would be covered in
the course and learning the new R statistics as well writing a HTML page (this is the product). It was also an exposer trip for me to the outside world. And man, was it an eyeopener!!
The main objective of the course was to compare the different ecological process that were taking place in different habitat types, so we travelled to six different sites to achieve this. At three of these sites we carried out small projects that answered different ecological or biological questions. At other sites we had activities like discussions and debates on issues that are currently being faced by countries in the tropical region. Lambir Hills National Park, where I saw my first Dipterocarp tree was our first stop. And here I conducted my project on plants growing in treefall gaps. We later went onto Gaya Island, just off the coast from the capital, Kota Kinabalu. There, for our group project we compared coral diversity across three reef habitats. Gunung Kinabalu, Deramakot, Sepilok (where we observed feeding orang-utans) Sandakan and then Maliau Basin, Sabah's lost world. The group project we conducted at Maliau Basin compared the diversity of ground dwelling insects between two different habitat types. One other project we had to do was producing a minimonograph of a focal taxon that we chose at the begining of the course. I chose the genus Nepenthes as my focal taxon. See here the example of my minimonograph. Using the openoffice program, Mesquite, I produced a phylogenetic tree that represents the data that I had collected for the minimonograph. Mesquite is an open-source program that helps one make phylogenetic trees besides it being a good databasing program.
