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Fieldwork begins on the Overseas Research Programme 'Biotic Interactions in Tropical Rain Forest (BITRF)' (May 2000)
The BITRF consortium comprises ecologists at four UK Universities, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and three Malaysian institutions working collectively to test the hypothesis that biotic factors, such as herbivores, mycorrhizas, seed predators, fungal pathogens and competitor plant species, interact with the abiotic environment to determine the performance and survival of juvenile life-stages of species of Dipterocarpaceae. This family of trees dominates the canopy of lowland rain forests in Southeast Asia. In October 1999, four PhD students started their degree programmes on the BES-funded Overseas Research Programme on 'Biotic Interactions in Tropical Rain Forest' (BITRF). They were joined by a fifth PhD student and a field co-ordinator after arriving at Sepilok, their field site in Sabah, Malaysia, in early January.
The fieldwork at Sepilok Forest Reserve in northeast Sabah started in January 2000 with a joint planning meeting of collaborators, staff and students hosted by the Forest Research Centre Sabah (FRC). As all of the BITRF projects will involve field and nursery perturbation experiments using dipterocarp seedlings, the first task was to organise the transport of nine thousand seedlings from a commercial nursery 150 km to the south of Sepilok. The species we selected vary in their inherent growth rates, shade tolerance and distribution in relation to soil type. These differences will allow us to test specific hypotheses relating these life history traits to their performance when challenged with biotic components of their regeneration niche. Field sites at Sepilok have now been selected and prepared for the start of experiments, and a section of the FRC forest nursery has been modified to house experiments that require a greater degree of control over seedling growing conditions. Future Bulletin items will report on the progress of these experiments, and profile some of the staff and students implementing the research.
The programme is being co-ordinated in the field by tropical ecologist Kalan Ickes, who has been seconded from his PhD research at Louisiana State University during the early stages of BITRF. Kalan's PhD investigates the effects of native wild pigs on the understorey plant community in a Malaysian rain forest, and he also has experience of conducting research on the ecology of invasive plants, tropical forest community ecology and succession in sites as disparate as Costa Rica, Papua New Guinea and Brazil. Kalan will rejoin BITRF in January 2001 as full-time field co-ordinator.
David Burslem (BITRF Co-ordinator) 
University of Aberdeen
d.burslem@abdn.ac.uk
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