Setia Alam Field Station is the research site and base camp for OuTrop. Setia Alam means 'Loyal to Nature' and our camp is sited just inside the forest edge, surrounded by jungle and accessed from the Sabangau River by a 1km long railway, the lasty remnant of the logging company that worked here previously. Camp is approximately 20km SW of Central Kalimantan Province's capital of Palangka Raya, where our Indonesian partners CIMTROP have their office. Setia Alam is managed by CIMTROP - the Center for International Cooperation in Management of Tropical Peatland - and used solely for the purposes of scientific research.

The field station has developed considerably since its first use by researchers in 1993. The first huts were built using locally-sourced wood and woven-grass roofs, but these have all long sice fallen down and been replaced - the high acidity of the peat, heavy rainfall and wet-season flooding quickly decay the wood and eat away at the foundations. All our newer buildings are built using strong ulin wood that will last for several decades, and we are grateful to the US Fish and Wildlife Service Great Ape Conservation Fund, IdeaWild, IFAW, British Ecological Society and CIMTROP's sponsors for providing the funding to build and maintain camp. The camp is built around a central meeting area which leads to three accomodation buildings, a kitchen and dining room, office, laboratory, washing area, toilets and bathrooms, and the badminton court - only playable in the dry season! Electricity comes from a diesel-powered generator and two solar panels, and camp is regularly supplied from our local village of Kereng Bangkerai.

To visit Setia Alam, you fly into Palangkaraya airport, take a minibus to Kereng Bangkerai, hop on a klotok (a small boat) to the Natural Laboratory jetty, from where you board our famous train to travel the last kilometre and a half into camp. Don't turn up without anyone knowing as you'll be stranded here! The railway runs through a large area of grass and sedge swamp that separates the river from the forest. In the wet season this floods to six metres deep, and we can take our klotok straight into camp. The railway was left over by the logging company, as they used it to take timber out of the forest to the river. This has had to be replaced many times over and we are grateful to the Government of Finland and CIMTROP's sponsors and for providing funding to do this.

From camp, take any of four paths into the jungle and you enter the Natural Laboratory of Peat Swamp Forest, 50,000 hectares of dense jungle in the vast Sabangau Forest. Contiguous with the rest of the forest, the Natural Laboratory is a scientific research and monitoring facility, the main aim of which is to promote the conservation of the Sabangau Forest and its globally important biodiversity. It was formally designated by Decree of the Ministry of Forestry, dated 2nd February 1999, No. 191/Menhutbun-VII/1999. This placed overall management control of the Natural Laboratory with the Ministry of Research and Technology (BPPT), and day-to-day management in the hands of CIMTROP and its director Suwido Limin. To read more about CIMTROP click here. The success of the Natural Laboratory in protecting tropical forest and promoting collaboration between researchers, ecologists and conservationists, is a fantastic example of how locally-managed conservation projects, applying local solutions to local problems, can succeed.

Inside the Natural Laboratory we have cut and marked a trail system measuring 2.5 km by 2.5km, with trails every 250m running north-south and east-west. Within this grid system we have many permanent plots set-up for studies of long-term habitat regeneration and forest productivity. We're not the only people who use the Natural Laboratory though, researchers from the Indonesian University of Palangkaraya and National Institute of Sciences (LIPI), the University of Leicester, the Japanese universities of Hokkaido, Kyoto and Tokyo, the University of Helsinki in Finland, University of Munich in Germany and several Dutch institutions are studying many different aspects of peatland ecology, including climatalogy, hydrology, restoration techniques, peat respiration and carbon-cycling, nutrient-cycling and remote-sensing. Although there are many different groups working here, we have a common cause and work together through the EU-funded Strappeat, Restorpeat and Carbopeat collaborations, and an International Expert Network for tropical peatlands.

The logging railway used to run 25km into the heart of the forest. This has long-since been pulled up and taken away, but the route through the forest remains. The jungle keeps trying to reclaim it, but we regularly clear the re-growth of pandan, giving us a path 12km to the tall interior forest, the biggest and most diverse area of jungle in the Natural Laboratory. The route to the tall forest runs through the low pole forest where we maintain a forward camp which we visit annually to survey these remote forest areas. Although the low pole is dense, hot, wet and low in all biodiversity except mosquitoes, our work here as been absolutely crucial in determining exactly how illegal logging can cause overcrowding of orangutan and a dramatic population crash. We have also started building satellite camps in remote locations for our ecological monitoring project. More of these to be built in 2008!

Download a Map of the Natural Laboratory here