General surveyor projects

The programme comprises a 2-week period, with the first week working in the Lambusango forests and a second week at the marine site on Hoga Island or for those in 2012 spending their first week at the North Buton site there will be the choice of going to the new Ereke marine site or travelling onto Hoga Island.

Lambusango

Students will travel by vehicle from Bau Bau to the Labundo site (3 hours) and will complete 6 days of training and research in the Lambusango forests. These are divided into 2 days of jungle skills training, 2 days of forest measurements and 2 days of learning about biodiversity techniques from lectures and practicals. Over the course of the week each group will spend 2 nights in Lapago field camp in hammocks or tents and for the rest of the time they will be in local houses in Labundo village. The jungle training elements will consist of learning how to live in hammocks how to build natural shelters, make fires, dig latrines, and ensure water is sterilised. Emphasis is placed on the animals and plants that could be dangerous and how to maintain health whilst living in a tropical forest field camp. If the group wants to do the canopy access option then they will be able to do this during this 2 day period. The 2 days on biodiversity monitoring include a series of short lectures about Wallacea wildlife and the survey techniques being used followed by practicals to demonstrate some of these techniques and identify the commoner species. The reason the General Surveyors have been invited to join the biodiversity surveys is to complete forest structure data collection on the series of standard sample sites being used by the various survey teams. These sites are distributed in areas of forest with differing levels of disturbance and the General Surveyors will be divided into small groups each of which will be completing detailed forest structure measurements in 50m x 50m blocks of forest around the sample sites. After training General Surveyors will be collecting data on canopy openness, spatial heterogeneity of the sites, size class structure of the larger trees, recruitment of saplings etc.

Hoga

For the second week students will have the opportunity to complete one of the following a PADI Scuba Diver training course, or Reef ecology course. The PADI qualification will be achieved in half a week and qualifies the students to dive to 12m with a Dive Master present. The second half of this week would then be spent on a Reef Survey Methodologies course where the students will be learning various reef survey techniques such as line intercept transects, quadrats, manta tow surveys etc. · Alternatively if the student is already dive trained or they don't wish to dive then the option is to do Indo-Pacific reef ecology course. This course consists of lectures and twice daily in-water practicals that can be done either by diving or snorkelling depending on the preference of the student. The course aims to teach the students how to identify the main families of corals, macro-invertebrates and fish and the latter part of the course concentrates on the survey methodologies

For the groups in the Lambusango forest then the marine week will be completed on Hoga Island in the Wakatobi. Students will return back to Bau Bau by vehicle (3 hours) and then take overnight boats to Wanci (8 hours) and on to Hoga (2 hours) arriving for breakfast. In North Buton the students will transfer to Hoga by boat from Ereke (6 hours) and on to Hoga (2 hours). In 2012 the groups in North Buton will also have the option of spending their second week at the Ereke site which is a 1 hour trek and 1 hour boat ride from the forest field site.

Typical Expedition schedule