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FX-PEDITION 2010 [top] [end]Exploring the Broken Heart of Borneo - To discover, educate & inspire[top] [end]A University College Falmouth and Exeter University Student Expedition"This promises to be outstanding... it is the best prepared expedition that I have ever seen"Dr George McGavin, BBC Presenter and Explorer, and FXP 2010 Patron In the summer months of 2010 an international team of young explorers, scientists, engineers and filmmakers will venture deep into the unexplored heart of Borneo - to discover, to educate, and to inspire.  The expedition leaves in July and will spend 12 weeks attempting to access and explore one of the final frontiers of the natural world – the Joloi/Kapuas watershed, deep in the mountainous interior of the Bornean rainforest. The Joloi River headwaters have never before been studied, so the team stands a chance of discovering species that are as yet unknown to science. Cambridge professor Dr David Chivers is an expert in the region, and says that "nobody knows who or what is up there!" Educate: Education is the most powerful tool conservationists have at their disposal. The expedition will be used to educate the local community and the wider world about the importance of the rainforests and how to protect them. Our website will be a virtual learning environment packed with multimedia, where teachers can download resources and lesson plans, and kids can interact with the expedition team in real time as they move through the jungle. We aim to have over a hundred schools and youth groups from around the world following us on our journey. Inspire: We will be one of the first truly interactive jungle expeditions, using the latest satellite technology to upload multimedia from the jungle as we go. In this way we can engage with a huge audience, and a section of our website will be dedicated to helping people make positive changes at home, school, or work, and to giving budding explorers the skills to undertake their own expeditions! The footage and photography will be used to produce a film and a book about the expedition, and the team will deliver lectures across Indonesia and the UK. Because the region is so remote and inaccessible it is one of the few areas of Borneo that are still undisturbed by man, meaning that it should be incredibly rich in wildlife. Rare and endangered species such as the orang-utan, Sumatran rhinoceros, and the clouded leopard are very likely to be clinging on to survival here. 52 new species have been discovered in Borneo in the past 5 years alone. The Joloi River headwaters have never before been studied, so the team stands a chance of discovering species that are as yet unknown to science. Cambridge professor Dr David Chivers is an expert in the region, and says that “nobody knows who or what is up there!” Stuart Chapman, former head of the WWF Heart of Borneo initiative said in relation to the discovery of so many new species that “the more we look, the more we find”. Meanwhile, FXP 2010 patron and BBC expedition presenter George McGavin has said that we will “almost certainly find new species.”  The World Wildlife Fund has set up an initiative called The Heart of Borneo Project. It is a highly ambitious plan to create a transboundary national park the size of the UK in an attempt to preserve the central belt of remaining rainforest that follows the mountainous spine of the island from the southwest to the northeast. Ownership and responsibility for protecting the park will be shared between Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The boundary for the park has been drawn but not finalised, and so pressure from logging and mining companies could shrink the size of the park in their search for concessions. Our research site falls just within the current boundary, but it has also been awarded to a mining company for exploitation. Mining is the most destructive form of human activity in the forest, since it not only clear fells large areas but poisons and pollutes the surrounding water table. If we can prove the conservation value of this area through our research and highlight it through our media profile, we will have a good chance of ensuring that the as yet unspoiled Joloi headwaters remain intact. While we will survey plants, amphibians, reptiles, birds, small mammals, and primates, our research will focus on flagship species such as the endangered Bornean bay cat and flatheaded cat, the orang-utan, the vulnerable Sunda clouded leopard and marbled cat, the critically endangered Sumatran rhinoceros. Since wild cat species capture the imagination of the public so well, they have become important species for conservation. Proof that they roam the region would dramatically improve its conservation status. Downriver from Project Barito Ulu is a community of three villages – Muarajoloi I, Muarajoloi II, and Parahau Baru. While the main expedition team ventures off up the Joloi River, a small team of engineers and geographers will travel back down the Barito River to live and work with these communities.  Micro-hydro systems are becoming more widespread in developing countries as a source of sustainable electricity generation often as stand-alone systems. By researching and developing a microhydro system that can be built using cheap and easy to access materials we will also be able to offer guidance to other projects in developing countries that can be designed to be site-specific, economical, easy to maintain and efficient. FXP 2010 will be a truly unique jungle expedition in the way that the team will use satellite technology and the internet to take people from all over the world with them on the journey. We will be creating an online narrative of short videos in the run up to the expedition, introducing the team and going through the challenges of planning an expedition of this scale. We will continue to upload these videos 2 or 3 times a week throughout the expedition. The University of Exeter have kindly donated the funds to facilitate this. These videos will be hosted on our site and a number of others, including an online NatGeo Adventure Channel. In this way, anyone will be able to watch the daily trials of the expedition team, share our discoveries, and ask questions or make suggestions. We will even host some live conferences with a few lucky schools and groups! When we come back we will turn our footage into a three part documentary for television broadcast. We also have a dedicated wildlife photographer on the team, and his photographs along with those of the rest of the team will be used in exhibitions, lectures, and to illustrate the resulting book. Follow FX-PEDITION here Download the expedition brochure  here (4,019 KB) Supported by the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) with a Neville Shulman Challenge Award  | |
Page created:
15 February 2010; Last edited:
17 February 2010; Version: 0 | |
Pagename: FX-PEDITION2010UnitedKingdom @HEDON: FWTA | |
