Checklist week 1 fieldwork Indonesia

And were back! To give you an idea of what we did before travelling to our remote fieldwork site, here’s a (simplified) checklist: Arrange research & travel permit, KITAS, letters for governors, certificate of good conduct police (10 trips, at least 3 days) Give presentation at World Delta Summit & follow EcoDynamic Design workshop Buy …

East Kalimantan Programme Conference Samarinda

After our first meeting in Texel in 2009 our second meeting was in Samarinda, Indonesia. The university of Samarinda (UNMUL) hosted the meeting and in 2 days we were updated of the outcomes the 15 WOTRO/ KNAW Phd projects that are now running in the Mahakam and Berau river Delta, including my project. The projects …

Berau’s Green Turtles in National Geographic Indonesia

In January, National Geographic Indonesia published a very nice map about the important habitats for the green turtles in the Derawan Archipelago. See low resolution map below. The Editor in chief visited Derawan and interviewed all goverment NGO’s and researchers (me) having something to do with the green turtles in November and he made a good …

Strange turtle sightings

We explored the southern islands of the Berau Archipelago, Bilangbilangan, Blambangan and Mataha in search of more foraging areas for the green turtle.  In January 2010 National geographic Indonesia published a map + article on the green turtle in Berau. Turtle foundation is conserving the nesting beaches on these Islands and has posts on Bilangbilangan …

Mayo tagged with Fastlock GPS

Udayana University (Denpasar, Indonesia) and the joint program WWF Berau, was so kind to provide one of their fastlock gps systems (Sirtrack) to track a green turtle from Derawan to study the movement on its foraging ground. Jaya Rata came all the way from Denpasar to Derawan to attach the Sirtrack transmitter. He has tagged a lot …

Tankap Bokok

The special thing about this research area (Derawan, Indonesia) is the high density of Green turtles (Bokok in bahasa Bajau, the local language). Last year we found 1 turtle per 30 square meters of seagrass. However on the different feeding grounds densities differ, possibly regulated by the availability of food, seagrass. In the last 2 …

Monitoring river input on seagrass

After 1 week of preparation the penyu team arrived at Derawan. Here Ibu Heldi invested my last payments in improving her place. Now it feels even more like home and our own research station even! In the week that my supervisors are here we revisited the seagrass meadows that they sampled in 2003. Sampling the …

The New Penyu Team

Yesterday I arrived in Jakarta and there we made our first group picture with our fresh t-shirts. This was also the presentation of the new penyu.nl logo (see below). Meet our new team. From left to right Sarah Engelhard, Sjoerd van der Zon, Jan Roelofs (Prof. RU), Wawan Kiswara, Arifin (LIPI Oceanography, Jakarta), me, Leon …

Fieldwork with Wawan Derawan 2009

Derawan did not changed a lot since I left 10 months ago. This time Wawan and me came for only a few weeks to do 3 experiments on Derawan Island and to go to the other important Green turtle foraging grounds on Maratua (40km from Derawan) and Pulau Panjang (8 km from D).  What did …