Earth biodiversity is impacted by a wide range of environmental changes originating from dynamics at local(e.g. deforestation, urbanization) and regional (global climate changes) scales that have led to loss ofbiodiversity during the last decades. Biodiversity sustains ecosystem services (e.g. food security,epidemiological control) and its contribution in maintaining productive and resilient ecosystems is now widelysupported by empirical observations. Biodiversity, however, is not evenly distributed on Earth and someareas of exceptional richness facing severe anthropogenic perturbations have been identified as biodiversityhotspots. In Southeast Asia (SEA), several of the largest and most endangered hotspots have beenrecognized. The confusion that reigns over freshwater biodiversity in SEA, however, bridles conservationeffort and ecological climate change research.FRESHBIO aims at integrating human and life sciences with the objectives: (1) to break ground inbiodiversity monitoring by establishing new standards in biodiversity sciences, (2) to pioneer ecological andclimate change research in insular SEA through historical and monitoring approaches, (3) to explore manand biosphere relationship by assessing the impact of environmental changes on the biodiversity andcommunities at several spatial and temporal scales. With these objectives, FRESHBIO aims at: (1) framingbiodiversity research and monitoring through the development of automated DNA-based methods of speciesidentification and environmental DNA approaches, (2) assessing the ecological (community assembly anddynamics) and evolutionary (expansion vs. contraction) states of aquatic biodiversity in SEA insular hotspotsresulting from heterogeneous geological and biotic contexts, (3) assessing the impact of environmentalchanges on biodiversity through a mapping approach as well as identifying adaptive strategies andevaluating the resilience of local communities in front of biodiversity loss through a diachronic approach.FRESHBIO is proposed by a consortium of researchers from France, Germany, Philippines and Indonesiawith a long-standing interest on the ecology and evolution of insular SEA freshwater biotas as well as itsconservation and sustainable use. This project offers a unique opportunity to regionalize biodiversityresearch in insular SEA and helps break through the taxonomic impediment for large-scale assessments ofthe state of freshwater biodiversity. Compliant with the Access and Benefit Sharing principle of theConvention on Biological Diversity, FRESHBIO matches several of the national priorities of the participantssuch as the development of solutions for stopping biodiversity loss and concepts for sustainable usestrategies to ensure essential ecosystem services, the development of scientific networks to increase theacademic competitiveness of developing SEA partners and scientific innovation in a changing world.

Since December 2004 over 2000 km of the Sunda megathrust fault has been ripped open in a sequence of great subduction earthquakes killing an estimated 250000, dramatically illustrating the destructive power of subduction zone earthquakes and stimulating renewed research activity to understand them. This sequence provides a unique opportunity to make a fundamental advance in earthquake science for three reasons: 1. These great earthquakes have been recorded with unprecedented clarity. Instruments deployed over a period of more than a decade have not only produced a detailed picture of the slip during and after the shocks but have produced detailed maps of the distribution of interface coupling - where strain is building up to near breaking point and where the fault is slipping harmlessly and helping to explain why they ruptured where they did. 2. Uniquely on a major plate boundary, the Sumatra coast and offshore islands are colonised with coral microatolls whose growth habit records the vertical component of deformation extending back up to 700 years. These give the possibility of understanding the deformation over several seismic cycles - currently impossible on any other subduction zone. 3. In a current NERC project a technique, Monte-Carlo Slip Estimation (MCSE), has been developed which produces high-resolution probabilistic estimates of interseismic loading and slip on the megathrust based on this coral geodesy. (MCSE for the 1797 (M8.8) and 1833 (M9.0) earthquakes show remarkable control of present-day coupling on slip in 200 year old earthquakes quantitatively illustrate that Sumatran asperities are long-lived.) The distribution of plate coupling together with known rates of convergence and strain release in historical earthquakes constrained by the coral geodesy have been combine to attempt to explain the recent earthquakes. While features of the 2004 and 2005 earthquakes conform well to a relatively simple model of strain accumulation and release, the 2007 event nucleates to far south and does not release the expected energy over a big enough region. Distributions of coupling explain many observations, but an incomplete model of the fault zone pre-stress and probable periods of aseismic relaxation in the interseismic periods has left vital gaps in the picture. This project will help to fill these gaps. MCSE, combined with a carefully constructed database of coral displacements covering the megathrust from the equator to 4S, will produce a 700 year record of strain accumulation and release. For every period of interseismic loading, possibly containing episodes of aseismic slip, and for every earthquake, the slip, or load, on the megathrust will be modelled together with a clear distribution of uncertainty in the model. The result will be a movie of 700 years of on-fault stress accumulation and release. Nowhere else on the planet is such a reconstruction currently possible. Never before has it been so systematically attempted. Detailed comparison of the slip distributions in the recent earthquakes with this 700 year stressing history will provide a unique opportunity to understand the mechanisms for rupture nucleation, propagation and termination. Not only will we contribute to the scientific understanding of seismogenesis but the study will produce a map of the probability of slip on the next Mentawai Islands earthquake which is expect to rupture the Siberut segment of the megathrust imminently and potentially generate a devastating tsunami. This probability map will be used to generate a series of possible earthquake models which will drive tsunami simulations over high-resolution bathymetric and digital elevation models producing statistical estimates of likely inundation from a near-future earthquake. At the request of KOGAMI, a local NGO who are working to educate at-risk communities on the Sumatran coast, selected simulations will be developed into inundation animations for use in this educational work.

Globally, almost half of all remaining tropical forest is allocated for timber production, illustrating the enormous economic asset that these forests represent to many nations. Additionally, these forests provide important societal and ecosystem services, from being sources of food through to climate change mitigation and generating income from carbon offset schemes. Compared to undisturbed forests, much less is known about previously logged and degraded forests that are regenerating. Critically, with increasingly smaller areas of undisturbed forest remaining, the economic and societal importance of disturbed forests has become greater in recent years. However, the resilience of these forests i.e. their capacity to respond to short-term perturbations (e.g. ENSO-induced drought) by resisting damage and recovering quickly, is poorly understood. If we are to manage tropical forests, both in terms of their initial exploitation and subsequent rehabilitation, we need to better understand how these systems respond to periodic drought at local to regional scales. Only then can we develop policies and practice that explicitly take into account the impacts of drought and protect the economic and societal benefits derived from these fragile ecosystems. To provide the evidence from which policy makers and practitioners can better plan forest management strategies we will examine the impact of the current ENSO drought on logged and degraded forests in Borneo, SE Asia, using a combination of ground-based and satellite remote sensing methods. In the field we will examine the response of trees to drought across a disturbance gradient, making use of a network of forest inventory plots that were established in the mid-1990s at the time of the last major ENSO drought to affect the region. In 2014 these plots were revisited as part of a long-term study into post-logging recovery of disturbed forests and as such represent a unique natural laboratory for comparing ENSO-induced changes in forest structure, composition and ecosystem functioning across a land-use gradient and addressing the interactions of logging disturbance and drought. We will revisit 25 plots at least four times during the 18 month project. At each plot we will measure a variety of leaf traits, canopy structure and tree mortality. This will be done by a joint team of UK and Malaysian research assistants who will harvest leaves and analyse leaf chemical properties in facilities at the Universiti of Malaysia. Additionally we will collect spectral reflectance measurements from the leaves. This will allow us to scale up our field observations to use multispectral satellite images to map forest response to the current drought across wider regions. In particular, we will make use of the new Sentinel-2 earth observing satellite to generate region-wide maps of current drought impact, whilst also producing a 20 year time-series drought index from NOAA AVHRR imagery. The latter will provide evidence of the temporal response of the forest to drought in comparison with non-drought conditions, whilst the former will allow us to map the spatial coherence of forest response, determining whether prior disturbance or other factors affect the resilience of forests to drought events. Finally, we will track changes in canopy structure and composition through observations from UAV-mounted sensors, from which we will examine the dynamics of liana/tree composition, which appear to change during drought conditions. With our project partners, the South East Asian Rainforest Research Programme and Permian Global, we will engage with a network of actors who are responsible for forest management across the SE Asia region. We will do this through dissemination activities including a workshop in Malaysia, where will present evidence of the impact of the current ENSO on SE Asian forests and provide a forum for discussion on how best to adapt forest management policy and practice to future ENSO events.

This project will investigate the understudied Seasonal Forests of Wallacea in East and West Nusa Tenggara Provinces of Indonesia, specifically the islands of Sumbawa, Sumba and Flores, to assess how they will be affected by imminent environmental change and to evaluate their present and future economic potential. The forests of Indonesia are some of the most biodiverse but unexplored in the world with huge potential to be effectively managed to support economic development. To allow local communities to develop a stable green economy based on the region's natural capital assets, we must fully understand the forests' diversity and distribution. To address this need, we will first produce a Natural Capital Asset Register of the region's plant diversity consisting of species checklist, forest atlas derived from satellite imagery, ecoregion definition, and ethnobotany database. A structured programme of exploration across the three islands, generating plot and soil data, will give us an understanding of the standing biomass and soil fertility to understand ecosystem function. We will then compare these data to climatic variables to model the response of the Seasonal Forests of Wallacea to climate change and map anthropogenic risks, such as development for mining and infrastructure. We will carry out conservation red-listing to assess the resilience of the region's biodiversity to these environmental changes. Finally, we will determine which natural capital assets of the Seasonal Forests can be developed, working at both the species level, identifying plant resources that have further potential for economic exploitation and habitat level, exploring the potential for and risks of forest-based eco-tourism. We will initiate a programme of capacity building to develop regional scientific capacity to deliver these aims. We have assembled a group of experts from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Surya University, Herbarium Bogoriense, and the University of Nusa Cendana in Indonesia to undertake the programme of exploration, mapping, seed-banking, training, and analysis to inform the development of Wallacea's green economy. The proposed research will have three Work Packages: 1. Documenting the plant diversity of Wallacea's Seasonal Forests and how it is distributed: building an inventory of the region's natural capital. 2. Asessing the resilience of Seasonal Forests in Wallacea to climatic and anthropogenic changes 3. Evaluating the potential of Wallacea's natural capital to underpin its green economy: building in-country capacity around a green economy. The overall goal of this project is to produce new biodiversity data from the Wallacea region, to determine the distribution of, and threats to, selected species, better characterise regional biodiversity associations though ecoregion definition, and understand the resilience at the species and habitat level to future environmental change in Wallacea. These data will be interpreted and made easily available for use by local communities and other stakeholders, enabling them to exploit and manage the biodiversity more effectively, whilst conserving the habitats and endemic, endangered and economic species.

Regenerating degraded tropical forests is a key approach for mitigating future climate change and restoring essential ecosystem services, including water cycling and biodiversity conservation. The Bonn Challenge sets two key targets: to restore 150 million hectares of degraded lands by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030, with the aim of re-instating ecological integrity alongside human well-being into degraded areas based on the forest and landscape restoration approach. Currently, the policy environment is conducive to restoration as countries have made significant commitments to restoring their forests in order to help meet their obligations under the Paris climate change agreement and the Bonn Challenge directly. There is significant opportunity for restoring natural forests in tropical Southeast Asia; whilst they have been extensively degraded by logging, fragmentation and industrial Oil Palm cultivation, mature natural forests in SEA have a capacity to store and cycle the largest quantities of above-ground carbon per unit area in the world (Banin et al. 2014; Sullivan et al. 2016), and therefore reinstating natural forests offers substantial ecosystem service benefits if long-term restoration can be achieved (Lewis et al. 2019). However, devising successful forest restoration strategies for tropical forests involves careful, evidence-based decision-making, at various spatial scales and working with multiple stake-holders. To ensure the long-term success of restoration efforts, our project initiates a new multidisciplinary network focussing on regeneration of Southeast Asian (SEA) logged and degraded forests. Our research will be delivered through two work packages. In work package 1, project partners will provide standardised data unavailable in the literature to deliver a new published synthesis of site-level evidence providing insights into post-restoration ecological processes (carbon accumulation and community dynamics). This work will provide a basis for a sustained long-term restoration experiment network. In work package 2, we host an interdisciplinary workshop which will use the Heart of Borneo project area as a transboundary case study to (i) identify the barriers, constraints and opportunities for forest landscape restoration and (ii) develop an agenda of research and data needs for spatial prioritization for landscape-level restoration These activities will be delivered through interactive engagement between academic and practitioner stakeholders, including key policy-makers, at a workshop in Malaysia, which will contribute to our broader, long-term goal of linking ecological and social science research to policy and practice in restoration decision-making. The proposed FOR-RESTOR project will be a new collaboration between the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), Universities of Aberdeen, Exeter, Oxford and RSPB in the UK and international partners from Australia, Italy, Sweden, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia & Singapore. The team uniquely brings together expertise in carbon cycling, functional ecology, biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships, conservation genetics, genetic resources and seed systems, ecological restoration, forest landscape restoration and forest science-policy and science-practice interfaces.