During the field seasons of 2012 and 2013 I was the entomology team leader at Operation Wallacea, Indonesia. The country of Indonesia is a huge country made up of around 18,000 islands across 5,000km. With a population of around 260 million people, and an incredible diversity of approximately 730 different languages. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the island biogeography provides a hot-house for speciation in this tropical island region with an incredible examples of adaptation and endemism. The Wallacea region, named after the famous naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace
I worked in the main base for the university students doing the jungle training course, and the starting point for school students in south Buton is the village of Labundo. I conducted lepidoptera pollard surveys, banana baited bottle canopy arthropod surveys and Dung beetle surveys in both natural habitats and disturbed agricultural ecosystems. As well as this, I conducted rapid biodiversity assessment of termites using the standard transect method.
Fevziye Hasan 