KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia—There are macaques everywhere—climbing on the rocks, grooming one another as they sit on the forest floor. Others have babies on their backs as they trot along at a fair clip. The air is thick with humidity and it must be 35 degrees Celsius or more—the heavy gray clouds above look ready to crack into a noisy tropical thunderstorm at any moment. I'm making my way along a dense rainforest path with the noisy thrum of insects all around me.

I could be almost anywhere in the tropics, but here at Kepong, 16 kilometers north of Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur, the land holds something very special. For what seems to the untrained eye to be dense primary rainforest is in fact an area that was denuded as recently as the 1920s. Scrubby vegetation, made up of grasses, ferns and fast-growing pioneer bushes and trees, was all that remained after the forest had been stripped to allow tin mining and vegetable cultivation.

But in 1926 pioneering forestry scientists in the pay of the British colonial government started a grand experiment to reseed, and it's now the only place in the world where there is a very large tract of artificially seeded rainforest—one which has slowly been regenerating for nearly 90 years.

View a slideshow of the Malaysian rainforest regeneration

Today the Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM) has a regeneration experiment that covers 500 hectares and—aside from the years of Japanese occupation during World War II—they have a largely unbroken record of the number, diversity and size of rainforest trees growing here.

What researchers are learning from this experiment is significant, as so much of Malaysia, Indonesia and other tropical nations have been deforested. If the United Nations's plans for reducing emissions from degradation and deforestation are successful, and deforestation can be slowed and eventually reversed, how long will it take—and how easy will it be—to replace the rainforest we've lost?

 "This is certainly one of the oldest rainforest regeneration experiments around—if not the oldest—and it's really big in scale," says Bill Laurance, Australian laureate and expert on tropical forests at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland. "That's important because it means you can limit spillover effects from nearby old-growth rainforest. These can create the misleading impression that more species survive in the regenerating forest than is actually the case."

Laurance says that reforestation experiments are ongoing in many parts of the tropical world: "in Costa Rica, Brazil, Panama, Puerto Rico, tropical Australia and other locales. Some are trying to promote regeneration of timber species, whereas others are trying to yield a broad array of ecosystem services such as carbon storage, maintenance of water flow and quality, and biodiversity."

These kind of experiments "tell us a lot about rebuilding a rainforest," he says, as well as inform us about "what we can do that will help forests recover their biodiversity, carbon storage and other ecological functions in as short a time as possible—and hopefully in a way that roughly approximates the forest that was there originally."

The plantation experiment set in motion by the British was intended to help make the best use of the colony of Malaya's (as Malaysia was known under British rule) timber resources and was also instructive in the development of rubber plantations that were spreading across the region to fuel the booming new automobile industry.

In the early 1900s Malaya's forests were known to be extraordinarily diverse, and the British wanted to know which of the timber trees would be best for cultivation and which could be used on land that had been previously deforested. After 1963, however, as Malaysia's forests have dwindled and learning how to manage this resource sustainably has gained importance, the institute has morphed into one that today is interested in ecology, biodiversity and sustainable forestry—and the experiment has become useful for another reason entirely.

5 Comments

1. 1. payitfwd 08:57 PM 5/3/12

   That's really good news. The only downside is if certain factions use this information to take the attitude of "See? We can grow it all back if we want to so it's no big deal."
   
   Since this process takes hundreds of years, governments need to start more large-scale reforestation projects as soon as possible.

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this

2. 2. Mark665165165 01:39 PM 5/4/12

   Really nice, but this is not the world’s oldest rainforest reforestation project. Rio’s tropical rainforest (the Amazon being not tropical, but equatorial) Floresta da Tijuca, also the world’s largest urban forest, was reforested in 1854 over coffee farmland. And Payitfwd is right, it takes ages.

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this

3. 3. Michelsk 11:41 PM 5/9/12

   Hope for Haiti. I saw the incredible potential of rainforest regeneration (and the catastophic consequences of nearby deforestation) first hand there in Cange. But so much more needs to be done
   

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this

4. 4. EdenReforestation 10:35 AM 5/14/12

   It's great to see what they've done thus far. It would certainly be nice to see their commitment increasing versus decreasing as the years go by. We've been blessed at www.edenprojects.org to plant over 44,000,000 trees over the past 7 years and each year we've been able to increase our commitment. We have the capacity to plant 50,000,000 trees per year, we just need to financial resources to do so. At $0.10 per tree we're raising an army of average people to help combat this problem!

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this

5. 5. Montreal2 06:22 AM 5/20/12

   I am relieved to read that there is hope for the rainforest, as I usually see bad news only.
   Any ideas on haow to speed the process and prtotect more efficiently endangered species?

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this