Planting the future together

Text: Esther Sambale

Iskandar Siregar is happiest when he’s in the rainforest overnight. “When I wake up there in the morning and hear the sounds of gibbons, the call of the rhinoceros bird and all the other animal noises, I am impressed every time. Moments like these show how important an intact ecosystem is. Our rainforests are threatened by degradation and deforestation. We must restore them – for the sake of nature and as an existential basis for the population,” says the Indonesian professor of forest genetics and Vice-Rector for Global Connectivity, Cooperation and Alumni of IPB University, an agricultural university in the Indonesian city of Bogor. Through his research, he wants to preserve genetic diversity and make native tree species more resilient.

Ultimately, it was his inquisitive nature that led him to science: “I knew about forestry in West Java from my father, who was a forester, but I wanted to know how forest management was practised in other places.” He went to the University of Canterbury in New Zealand to do his master’s and then to the University of Göttingen in Germany from 1996 to 2000 to do his PhD on a DAAD scholarship. “The first thing my doctoral ­supervisor Professor Hans Hattemer said to me was ‘Thank you for coming! Thank you for studying forest ­genetics!’ That shaped my academic philosophy – everyone who is interested in our field is welcome.”

During his time in Göttingen, Siregar also came to appreciate the value of interdisciplinary work, such as that conducted for a DFG research project that involved more than 160 researchers from different specialist areas studying the ­consequences of transforming forests into farmland in lowland rainforest regions. “Biodiversity loss and climate change are complex problems. We need people from all disciplines to work on solutions,” says Siregar. As initiator of the Indo­nesian Arboriculture Society, he engages in exchange with political decision-makers and stakeholders in urban planning and business. “We have for example succeeded in defining uniform standards for tree risk assessment in major ­cities.”

Siregar touches upon another issue that is important to him: “Indonesia is one of the world’s biggest biodiversity hotspots and there is still so much to discover. New technologies such as artificial intelligence or mobile DNA sequencing, which we can work with directly in the rainforest, have accelerated our work, but our capacities are limited. We urgently need young talent.” He is keen to help early-career researchers get into forest genetics, believing that they are the future of his field – and of Indonesia’s rainforests. —