Tropical forests are being rapidly altered by logging, and cleared for agriculture. Understanding the effects of these land use changes on soil fungi, which play vital roles in the soil ecosystem functioning and services, is a major conservation frontier. Using 454-pyrosequencing of the ITS1 region of extracted soil DNA, we compared communities of soil fungi between unlogged, once-logged, and t...

For two consecutive years in Abbi, Delta State of Niger-Delta of Nigeria one, two and three beehives were integrated in oil palm plantation to determine optimum productivity of the oil-palm honey bee farming system. The fresh fruit bunch (economic yield) of the oil palm was statistically similar at 0, 1, 2 and 3 bee hive(s) per hectare. The honey yield were statistically similar for each bee hi...

Oil palm tree is an important cash crop in Thailand. To maximize the productivity from planting, oil palm plantation managers need to know the number of oil palm trees in the plantation area. In order to obtain this information, an approach for palm tree detection using high resolution satellite images is proposed. This approach makes it possible to count the number of oil palm trees in a plant...

This paper reports measurements of land-atmosphere fluxes of sensible and latent heat, momentum, CO(2), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), NO, NO(2), N(2)O and O(3) over a 30 m high rainforest canopy and a 12 m high oil palm plantation in the same region of Sabah in Borneo between April and July 2008. The daytime maximum CO(2) flux to the two canopies differs by approximately a factor of 2, 120...

on the forests, wildlife, and indigenous people of this area, WWF warns. It is not necessary to use this area as there is already a total of 2.3 million hectares of idle or derelict land available for palm oil plantations in Kalimantan, an area greater than the proposed plantation, WWF points out. In addition, oil palm is not recommended for planting in areas more than 200 metres above sea leve...

Crude palm oil production is reaching 48.99 million metric tonnes per year globally in 2011 and Southeast Asia is the main contributor, with Indonesia accounting for 48.79%, Malaysia 36.75%, and Thailand 2.96% (Palm Oil Refiners Association of Malaysia, 2011). Oil palm is a multi-purpose plantation and it is also an intensive producer of biomass. Accompanying the production of one kg of palm oi...

Anthropogenic land-cover change is driving biodiversity loss worldwide. At the epicenter of this crisis lies Southeast Asia, where biodiversity-rich forests are being converted to oil-palm monocultures. As demand for palm oil increases, there is an urgent need to find strategies that maintain biodiversity in plantations. Previous studies found that retaining forest patches within plantations be...

The clearing land or clearing of oil palm plantations needs stakeholders‟ involvement in decision making, such as the role of government group, environmentalists, investors and the agricultural community groups from non-governmental organizations (NGO). This paper discusses about the Group Decision Support (GDS) that can be used for Oil Palm Plantation Land Clearing cases involving various stak...

OBJECTIVES To determine the leptospirosis seroprevalence and to identify the predominant infecting serovars among oil palm plantation workers. METHODS The cross-sectional study involved 350 asymptomatic oil palm plantation workers in Melaka and Johor. A serological test using the microscopic agglutination test was conducted in the Institute of Medical Research with a cut-off titre for seropos...

More than half the world's rainforest has been lost to agriculture since the Industrial Revolution. Among the most widespread tropical crops is oil palm (Elaeis guineensis): global production now exceeds 35 million tonnes per year. In Malaysia, for example, 13% of land area is now oil palm plantation, compared with 1% in 1974. There are enormous pressures to increase palm oil production for foo...