Distribution of fruit trees at different elevations at Mount Singai, Bau, Sarawak, Malaysia

Singai Bidayuhs (BiSingai) once settled on Mount Singai, Bau district, Sarawak in eight villages about 230 meters up the mountain. Since their farms were located downhill, they had to commute between their farms and their mountain villages. Along the trails there are fruit trees and other cash crops, resulting in a mosaic of forests types while areas further up the mountain have been left undisturbed. An inventory of the fruit trees was made along a trail that lead from the foothill to the top of Mout Singai, passing through the old mountain village, to determine if the occurrence of fruit trees followed a particular pattern or not. Sampling was carried out in the 16 plots established earlier for the tree/timber survey, each plot measured 50 meters away from the trail and 10 meters wide. A total of 254 fruit trees from 12 different families were recorded. The fruit trees along the route to the farm land occurred most frequently nearer to the trail (within 10 meters) than further away from the trail. In general the distribution of fruit trees decreases with increasing elevation and becomes rare at elevations 425-557 m (plots 13-16) where only 2 fruit trees were found. The majority of the fruit trees surveyed were found at the site of the abandoned village and at the foothill. In terms of distribution, the Meliaceae family with 98 individuals is the dominant family while the family Anacardiaceae, Burseraceae and Flacourticeae is the least with only 1 individual each. This study showed that the cultivation habits of the BiSingai affects the distribution of fruit trees on Mount Singai and that the number of fruit trees decreases with distance from trail

Understory plants in Mount Singai, Sarawak, Malaysia

Mount Singai in Bau District was settled by BiSingai tribe for almost 300 years before they moved downhill to 14 villages some 40 years ago. They extracted forest products and planted crops in their clearings at the mountain. The documentation of these plants and impacts of these activities on their composition in the area would be an interesting discovery. A survey on understory plants at undertaken to determine these information. Two subplots of 2 m x 2 m were made in each of the 16 plots (50 m by 10m) established along the main trail to the mountain top. All understory plants including epiphytes were recorded in these subplots. Preliminary results show that a total of 1,148 understory plants comprising of 142 species from 66 families were recorded. Family Selaginellaceae with 174 individuals (15.16% of total) dominates while Apocynaceae with 75 and Euphorbiaceae with 70 individuals are a distant second and third respectively. Families Verbenaceae, Theaceae, Rhamnaceae and Icacinaceae were among the 11 families with one individual each and were considered the least. Seedlings of middle to upper canopy trees with 396 individuals (34.5%) dominate the type of plants recorded. Mosses (Selaginella canaliculata) with 170 individuals (14.8%) form a distant second. Most of the mosses are found at the foothills (62.4%) where the forest floor is moister. Almost all plants have uses for man apart from their ecological role. About 16% (182 plants) can be used for landscaping or has ornamental value while 10% (112 plants) for other uses (timber, cultural, and handicrafts) followed by 7% (83 plants) have medicinal values. The remainder 771 plants (67.1%) have overlapping or combining uses for food, medicinal, landscaping and others. Although the study was only undertaken along a single trail which traverses through an abandoned settled area and farms, plants at Mount Singai are considered abundant and that the locals activities and presence have little impact on the plants there. Because it was discovered that the plots set-up missed more than 15% of the species and 21% of the family, it was suggested that more or bigger subplots be established to capture most plants. Studies on different trails in Mount Singai are being planned to understand more on the understory plants there. Further analysis and characterisation on the data collected as well as information on their distribution and their relationships with some environmental variations in the area such as soils and microhabitats will also be undertaken

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead