The Sabah biodiversity experiment (SBE) is one of the largest scientific investigations into forest ecology and restoration. For the next half century scientists form all over the world will try to answer questions such as these:
How does biodiversity affect the functioning of tropical forest ecosystems?
In particular: Can restoring the biodiversity of degraded forests improve carbon sequestration and the rates of other ecosystem processes?
In 2001 three scientists from the U.K. started to establish one of the largest ecological experiments ever set up. It covers an area of 500 hectares and it should go on for at least 60 years. Its aim is to find out whether and how much biodiversity is needed in order to maintain crucial ecosystem services such as flood protection or carbon sequestration.
The experiment is sited in north-eastern Borneo near the Royal Society’s Danum Valley research station in Sabah. The station is set within a larger area of previously logged land – an ideal place to study the effects of forests loss on spot. By systematically re-growing the lost forest, the scientists can find out exactly how much and what biodiversity is contributing to ecosystem services.
The researchers divided the 500 hectares of the experiment into 124 four-hectare plots like a checkerboard. In each field they planted around 1300 tree seedlings. Some plots contain monocultures of only one tree species. Some contain a 4-species mixture and some a diverse 16-species mixture.
Over the years, every such replanted plot will be compared with a set of unplanted ones. This allows the scientists to find out exactly, what the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem services is. They will see whether diverse plots retain more rainwater than monocultures or whether they can store more carbon. The answers this experiment can provide are innumerable and only dependent on the amount of investment it receives.
The Sabah project wants to test how increasing levels of tree diversity in the replanted areas will affect timber production, carbon sequestration and other ecosystem processes. It wants to find out which species exactly are preventing us from mudslides, and which combination of species has the greatest potential for taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in the wood of the trees.