Determining the Resilience of Logged Dipterocarp Forests to El Niño Drought

A large part of Professor Phillips’ work focuses on understanding the impacts of climate change on tropical forests of the world.

This project represents a natural extension of this effort, focusing on the challenging question of how resilient Indonesia’s forests will be to strong droughts, and especially whether and how their high production value to people of the region (for timber, for carbon, and for other non-timber forest products) can be sustained in the face of climate change.

The project involves important institutional collaborations - with the Bogor Botanical Garden, Indonesia Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and another key partner, CIRAD in France, who are monitoring a series of long-term plots in a logged forest in Kalimantan - to jointly address the key question of how logging intensity affects the sensitivity of Borneo’s precious dipterocarp forest to drought.