Syarifah Kamariah

Supervisor: Markus Eichhorn

Research Interests

Plants in natural environments form spatial patterns which may influence the properties of ecosystems.  Spatial patterns in tropical rain forests can reveal their ecological characteristics. The spatial patterning may influence their ability to withstand damage from windthrow and extreme weather events such as hurricanes. Selective logging may also have implications for the long-term structural stability of forests. Different forests have different spatial patterns, depending on the underlying forces that shape and change the forest.

My PhD, supervised by Markus Eichhorn, will focus on studying the features of tropical rain forests which confer stability by investigating the spatial patterns and structures of the forests under differing disturbance regimes, then constructing a forest simulation model. This will be used to predict trends in forest structure with differing forest management or disturbance regimes. The thesis will adopt a species-neutral approach since we assume the structure of tropical rain forest depends more on biomass and the physical parameters of stems than their identity. Tentatively, this research may contribute towards a sustainable means of forest management.

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