Can the Danau Girang Field Centre reforest northeastern Borneo in time to save elephants, orangutans, and proboscis monkeys?
By Ben Goldfarb
Mammals don’t get much odder than the proboscis monkey, a primate that swings—and occasionally swims—through riverside rainforests in Borneo, the vast Asian island shared by Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei. Nasalis larvatus possesses rusty-brown fur, a rotund pot-belly, and a fondness for leaves and fruit. As its name suggests, though, the proboscis monkey’s most notable feature is its pendulous nose, which, in males, can dangle lower than its mouth. The fleshy appendage may serve as a signal of social dominance or an amphitheater for raucous hoots and roars. Regardless, it is perhaps the primate world’s most impressive schnozz.
Unfortunately, the proboscis monkey, along with nearly all other Bornean wildlife, faces urgent perils. Most severe among them is the explosion of palm plantations, which supply oil for soaps, biofuels, and a dizzying array of food products worldwide. In the Kinabatangan region, a biodiverse wonderland of forests and floodplains in northeastern Borneo, logging and palm oil production destroyed two-thirds of forest cover between 1982 and 2014. The remaining forest consists mainly of disconnected fragments, islands of habitat in an ocean of palm monoculture.
Despite their degraded habitat, Borneo’s proboscis monkey—along with its clouded leopards, Bornean elephants, orangutans, and other species—have hope. That’s thanks in part to the Danau Girang Field Centre, a research station whose many scientists are studying the region’s wildlife, combating poachers, and protecting and restoring forest. “It’s a landscape that is under huge threats,” says Benoit Goossens, the center’s director. “But it’s still thriving, still harboring biodiversity.”
Proboscis monkeys
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Orangutan
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Estuarine crocodile
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Sundra clouded leopard
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Pangolin
Scubazoo
Monitor lizard
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Malay civet
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Danau Girang’s history dates to the late 1990s, when the Malaysian state of Sabah constructed an education center on an oxbow lake along the Kinabatangan River, which flows 350 miles from mountainous headwaters to the Sulu Sea. The building soon fell into disrepair and remained derelict until 2006, when Goossens, a conservation biologist at Wales’s Cardiff University, proposed turning it into a research station. With support from the university and the Sabah Wildlife Department, Goossens and others refurbished the facility, and officially opened Danau Girang in 2008. In the years since, a rotating cast of local and visiting scientists has undertaken a dizzying array of projects, from amphibian surveys to the study of monitor lizard diets. Its staff even managed to attach GPS tags to the necks of estuarine crocodiles.
Yet the center has devoted the most resources to understanding how mammals use Borneo’s landscape. The Kinabatangan is a vital ecosystem in part because it connects two important habitats, upland forest and coastal mangroves. Since the center’s inception, Goossens has placed radio and satellite tracking collars on species as diverse as bearded pigs, Sunda pangolins, and Malay civets to determine how they navigate this corridor, and how to make it more functional for as many creatures as possible. Some species, like Sunda clouded leopards, require thick canopy cover to move through the landscape; others, like Bornean elephants, prefer sparser forests with lots of bamboo, grasses, and other fast-growing foods. Orangutans are willing to disperse through palm plantations, while proboscis monkeys spend their nights almost exclusively in riparian areas, though they habitually stray as far as several hundred meters from the river’s edge. That’s an eye-opening discovery, given that the state requires landowners to protect only twenty meters alongside rivers. “We should push for corridors of at least 700 meters,” Goossens argues.
The center’s research has also demonstrated that Borneo’s wildlife faces rampant poaching as well as fragmentation. Pangolins and bantengs—a wild, cow-like mammal—are killed for their meat, and sun bears are captured for their bile, which is thought to possess medicinal qualities. The compounding pressures of oil palm plantations and wildlife trafficking can be enough to doom populations. Such was the case of the Sumatran rhinoceros, which was wiped from the preserve by horn poachers—an extirpation hastened by a lack of habitat connectivity and genetic diversity, which likely caused some females to develop ovarian cysts.
“If it was only fragmentation, we could potentially sort it out by establishing corridors,” Goossens says. “The two threats together, that’s where species can go extinct.”
That understanding, however, has also allowed the center to pursue solutions along two fronts—starting with law enforcement. To counteract the problem, Danau Girang has used grants from the US State Department to provide specialized training for the Sabah Wildlife Department’s enforcement officers, and to establish a local forensic unit capable of investigating wildlife crime. And, in 2022, it launched three Rapid Response Teams, ranger units that patrol for poaching in and around the reserve. The response teams “hope to eradicate poaching activities and ensure the survival of our national treasures in Sabah,” Yatela Zainal Abidin, the chief executive of the Malaysian philanthropy that helped fund the initiative, told one reporter.
At the same time, the center has aggressively pursued forest restoration. Its approach originated in 2014, when the Malaysian government tasked the group with replanting twenty acres of palm plantation that had illegally encroached upon a riparian reserve. The group planted 20,000 native trees, which induced proboscis monkeys and long-tailed macaques to repopulate the area. Today orangutans nest in the rejuvenated canopy. A formal restoration program began to cohere in 2018, when some of Goossens’ colleagues from Cardiff University flew to Borneo for Danau Girang’s ten-year anniversary and began to discuss the possibility of selling carbon offsets to fund restoration.
The idea was potentially fraught. Carbon offsets have recently come under fire for a variety of reasons. For one thing, some offset projects, particularly in tropical forests, have been undertaken without community consent; in one Peruvian park, locals were allegedly evicted to deter deforestation. For another, planted trees may subsequently die, allowing companies to claim credits for projects that aren’t actually sequestering carbon. One 2023 analysis by the Guardian deemed more than 90 percent of the offsets purchased by Disney, Shell, and other companies “phantom credits.”
From the get-go, however, Regrow Borneo, Danau Girang’s reforestation program, has taken a different approach. Unlike other carbon-credit programs, Regrow Borneo promises to restore hectares of forest rather than individual trees—which means that it replants after natural flooding or other forces kill trees, and continues to replant until it has successfully regrown forest. The team quantifies carbon sequestration by measuring the mass of trees, deadfall, roots, and other plant matter, as well as sampling soil. Of course, a forest includes wildlife, too—which is why Danau Girang’s scientists live-trap small mammals; deploy camera traps for larger ones; conduct nocturnal surveys for amphibians; mist-net understory birds; and even set pitfalls for dung beetles.
Moreover, Regrow Borneo aims to work with communities, rather than at odds with them. Its trees are grown at a nearby commercial nursery, and its two replanting crews are composed of locals. “This helps create sustainable livelihoods in an area impacted by oil palm plantations,” says Amaziasizamoria Jumail, a Danau Girang research officer and PhD student. “The community’s involvement helps them feel ownership and commitment to the project.”
According to Jumail, Regrow Borneo has restored around 30 hectares on the Kinabatangan floodplain so far. With nearly 2600 hectares still in need of restoration, the project has decades of work ahead to protect and reconnect this corner of Borneo’s landscape. Goossens, for one, believes Danau Girang can rise to the occasion. “Nothing is lost; there is still hope,” he says. “We’re a very small organization, but we make things happen.”
Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental journalist and author of the books Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.