Fish/Invertebrate community data, Sabah, Malaysia 2011

The study was carried out over a three-month period in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo from September to December 2011. This particular spreadsheet constitutes the baseline dataset for a long-term study, which aims to monitor the changes in composition and state of the aquatic communities within the SAFE Project's experimental area in the Kalabakan Forest Reserve. As the forest area is being cleared and converted to oil palm monocultures, the effectiveness of buffer zones of a range of thicknesses is being tested in terms of their respective capacities in buffering sources of riparian pollution including fertilizer/pesticide runoff or soil erosion. Fieldwork was operated in each stream over a 200 m transect starting at and going upstream from each stream's respective data logger. Sampling was conducted every 10 m along this transect. Aquatic invertebrate sampling was carried out using 20 submerged bottle traps, preferably squeezed between rocks. Fish sampling was mediated by a cast-net, thrown 10 times across the 200 m transect. Individuals were identified to species level and species-specific abundance was recorded. In total, sampling was repeated six times for each river.