Mapping Harapan Rainforest plants: towards restoring habitats

Welcome to the Kew Harapan rainforest project site. Use these pages to find out about our botanical work at the Harapan site in Jambi and south Sumatra Province, Sumatra. Thanks to a grant from Defra, we will be producing a vegetation map of the area. Once complete, it will be used to guide the reforestation of this former lowland rain forest site. Keep checking for new content. We will be feeding live images and results from the field. 

Using techniques developed at Kew, a team of botanists and Geographic Information Science (GIS) experts are producing a vegetation map of an area in the south of Sumatra, Indonesia: the Harapan rainforest. The Harapan site once formed part of the swathe of lowland tropical rain forest that covered the island of Sumatra. Although it is one of the few effectively protected areas left in the Sumatran lowlands, the former dominant rainforest habitat no longer exists within it. Harapan is a former logging concession, which is managed by a consortium of the RSPB, Burung Indonesia and BirdLife International has received the management. The consortium has committed to the management and revegetation of the significantly degraded parts of the concession: the aim is to restore habitats to their former, natural states. Kew’s expertise in the south east Asian flora and vegetation mapping techniques will provide the botanical background necessary for the RSPB and partners to achieve their goal.