Forestry. Sulawesi
Biodiversity and Tropical Forests in Indonesia.

Much lower deforestation rates occur in Sulawesi than elsewhere in Indonesia, mainly because the Sulawesi lowland forests were cleared by the mid 1980s. Sulawesi is mainly a mountainous island with lowlands only occupying about 25% of the total area. By 1985, only a quarter of these lowlands still carried forest, with rapid clearing occurring in the transmigration areas. Further, Sulawesi has an impoverished assemblage of dipterocarp trees, which are the mainstay of forestry practices in the Sunda islands. For example its seven species of dipterocarp can be compared to 267 and 106 species found in Borneo and Sumatra, respectively (Ashton 1982). The main commercial timber trees in Sulawesi are the tall Agathis, the legume Podocarpus indicus, the gum tree Eucalyptus deglupta, Beremba (Duabanga mollucana) and Gutta Perca (Palaquium spp.).

This figure does not account for forest quality, or the fact that land classified as forests may contain logged or burned forest areas of reduced value for biodiversity conservation. While factors involved in deforestation are those reported earlier in this Report, an increasing threat are local migrants. Possibly as many as 200,000 people are moving into forested areas from urban areas of Sulawesi and from other islands. These migrants have converted vast amounts of forest to the high-value cash crops, coffee and cocoa (Whitten et al. 2002).

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