This research endeavors to map out Bali artifacts currently held in Dutch museum collections. The research is also significant because it reveals the social and cultural impact of the loss of these objects on the affected communities. Artifacts passed down through generations are treated with reverence and often considered sacred. This collaborative research is crucial for Indonesian and Dutch researchers and museums to understand the significance of these objects to indigenous communities. Thus, these objects are not merely perceived as seized possessions from the colonial era but are also respected as ancestral cultural heritage of the Balinese community.

The content of the Great Pustaha and other Pustaha in the Van der Tuuk collection remains unknown because the evolution of the Batak language and script has made the ancient script and language increasingly difficult to read and understand. Even the majority of modern Batak people cant understand whats written in the Pustaha. Without context, the content of the Pustaha is like a riddle, and the ancient knowledge from Batak ancestors is facing extinction in the future.

This research focuses on digitizing Indonesian sculptures from the Hindu-Buddha Period (8th-15th CE) in Dutch museums. The aim is to create a digital database that is inclusive, applicable, and accessible. As a best practice for digital data utilization, this research also develops an artificial intelligence prototype program for studying Indonesian sculptures, sampling the Buddha Head statues from Buddhist Temple in Java as the pilot project.

Earth biodiversity is impacted by a wide range of environmental changes originating from dynamics at local(e.g. deforestation, urbanization) and regional (global climate changes) scales that have led to loss ofbiodiversity during the last decades. Biodiversity sustains ecosystem services (e.g. food security,epidemiological control) and its contribution in maintaining productive and resilient ecosystems is now widelysupported by empirical observations. Biodiversity, however, is not evenly distributed on Earth and someareas of exceptional richness facing severe anthropogenic perturbations have been identified as biodiversityhotspots. In Southeast Asia (SEA), several of the largest and most endangered hotspots have beenrecognized. The confusion that reigns over freshwater biodiversity in SEA, however, bridles conservationeffort and ecological climate change research.FRESHBIO aims at integrating human and life sciences with the objectives: (1) to break ground inbiodiversity monitoring by establishing new standards in biodiversity sciences, (2) to pioneer ecological andclimate change research in insular SEA through historical and monitoring approaches, (3) to explore manand biosphere relationship by assessing the impact of environmental changes on the biodiversity andcommunities at several spatial and temporal scales. With these objectives, FRESHBIO aims at: (1) framingbiodiversity research and monitoring through the development of automated DNA-based methods of speciesidentification and environmental DNA approaches, (2) assessing the ecological (community assembly anddynamics) and evolutionary (expansion vs. contraction) states of aquatic biodiversity in SEA insular hotspotsresulting from heterogeneous geological and biotic contexts, (3) assessing the impact of environmentalchanges on biodiversity through a mapping approach as well as identifying adaptive strategies andevaluating the resilience of local communities in front of biodiversity loss through a diachronic approach.FRESHBIO is proposed by a consortium of researchers from France, Germany, Philippines and Indonesiawith a long-standing interest on the ecology and evolution of insular SEA freshwater biotas as well as itsconservation and sustainable use. This project offers a unique opportunity to regionalize biodiversityresearch in insular SEA and helps break through the taxonomic impediment for large-scale assessments ofthe state of freshwater biodiversity. Compliant with the Access and Benefit Sharing principle of theConvention on Biological Diversity, FRESHBIO matches several of the national priorities of the participantssuch as the development of solutions for stopping biodiversity loss and concepts for sustainable usestrategies to ensure essential ecosystem services, the development of scientific networks to increase theacademic competitiveness of developing SEA partners and scientific innovation in a changing world.

Globally, almost half of all remaining tropical forest is allocated for timber production, illustrating the enormous economic asset that these forests represent to many nations. Additionally, these forests provide important societal and ecosystem services, from being sources of food through to climate change mitigation and generating income from carbon offset schemes. Compared to undisturbed forests, much less is known about previously logged and degraded forests that are regenerating. Critically, with increasingly smaller areas of undisturbed forest remaining, the economic and societal importance of disturbed forests has become greater in recent years. However, the resilience of these forests i.e. their capacity to respond to short-term perturbations (e.g. ENSO-induced drought) by resisting damage and recovering quickly, is poorly understood. If we are to manage tropical forests, both in terms of their initial exploitation and subsequent rehabilitation, we need to better understand how these systems respond to periodic drought at local to regional scales. Only then can we develop policies and practice that explicitly take into account the impacts of drought and protect the economic and societal benefits derived from these fragile ecosystems. To provide the evidence from which policy makers and practitioners can better plan forest management strategies we will examine the impact of the current ENSO drought on logged and degraded forests in Borneo, SE Asia, using a combination of ground-based and satellite remote sensing methods. In the field we will examine the response of trees to drought across a disturbance gradient, making use of a network of forest inventory plots that were established in the mid-1990s at the time of the last major ENSO drought to affect the region. In 2014 these plots were revisited as part of a long-term study into post-logging recovery of disturbed forests and as such represent a unique natural laboratory for comparing ENSO-induced changes in forest structure, composition and ecosystem functioning across a land-use gradient and addressing the interactions of logging disturbance and drought. We will revisit 25 plots at least four times during the 18 month project. At each plot we will measure a variety of leaf traits, canopy structure and tree mortality. This will be done by a joint team of UK and Malaysian research assistants who will harvest leaves and analyse leaf chemical properties in facilities at the Universiti of Malaysia. Additionally we will collect spectral reflectance measurements from the leaves. This will allow us to scale up our field observations to use multispectral satellite images to map forest response to the current drought across wider regions. In particular, we will make use of the new Sentinel-2 earth observing satellite to generate region-wide maps of current drought impact, whilst also producing a 20 year time-series drought index from NOAA AVHRR imagery. The latter will provide evidence of the temporal response of the forest to drought in comparison with non-drought conditions, whilst the former will allow us to map the spatial coherence of forest response, determining whether prior disturbance or other factors affect the resilience of forests to drought events. Finally, we will track changes in canopy structure and composition through observations from UAV-mounted sensors, from which we will examine the dynamics of liana/tree composition, which appear to change during drought conditions. With our project partners, the South East Asian Rainforest Research Programme and Permian Global, we will engage with a network of actors who are responsible for forest management across the SE Asia region. We will do this through dissemination activities including a workshop in Malaysia, where will present evidence of the impact of the current ENSO on SE Asian forests and provide a forum for discussion on how best to adapt forest management policy and practice to future ENSO events.