Prima Lady, or just “Lady” as she prefers, is currently monitoring landscape-level environmental availability of orangutan foods and their nutritional contents at the Tuanan Orangutan Research Station. Orangutans are “preferred frugivores,” meaning fruits comprise the majority of their diet when available. When fruits are not available, Bornean orangutans fallback on other food items like woody pith, tree bark, and high proportions of leaves. Because fruiting patterns can fluctuate drastically in southeast Asia and are a major food source for orangutans, the Tuanan Orangutan Research Station has tracked the environmental availability of fruits and other orangutan foods for over 15 years. At Tuanan “phenology” is measured monthly, which means forest technicians record whether trees are fruiting, flowering, and/or flushing leaves, for hundreds of tree species. Lady, in collaboration with her mentors, has begun monitoring phenology at the landscape-level on a considerably larger scale using drone technology. She uses the drone to quantify the environmental availability of food items for orangutans, and also matches these data to their known nutritional values. Lady’s research enables environmental data to be collected at significantly larger spatial scales than traditional phenology methods, resulting in both increased accuracy and efficiency in characterizing the orangutans’ changing nutritional environment.
Lady’s research involves taking repeated aerial photographs, using a high spectral camera, of more than 90 plots spanning the 1,000 hectare study area. She then merges these images to analyze for patterns of phenology and nutrient availability.
Lady is originally from Bekasi City in West Java. She completed her bachelor’s degree in biology at Universitas Nasional, Jakarta, in 2011. Lady aspires to join a graduate program in ecology or biology. She is currently collecting these environmental pilot data to be used toward a master’s thesis in graduate school.
Stay tuned for updates about Lady and her research!
CORE BORNEO 