Species Richness of Yapen Island for Sustainable Living Benefit in Papua, Indonesia

The objective of this study was to precisely identify the types of forest resources utilization in two local communities. All forest plants used were identified and classified based on their types and classes during data collection. Semi-structural interviews through questionnaires were undertaken to obtain daily information. The results showed that there were a total of 64 forest plant life forms and categories extracted for various reasons. Most of the subject forest plants were found in the surrounding lowland tropical forest, the dominant categories were monocotyledons followed by dicotyledons, pteridophytes, and thallophytes. A strong positive correlation was determined between the frequency of species use and the benefit value that was gained (0.6453), while a strong negative correlation was observed between the value of plant’s benefit and the difficulty of access to those plants (-0.2646). Frequency of use and the future prospect of forest plant availability (-0.1405) also showed a negative correlation.


INTRODUCTION
Papua Island is the largest land mass in the Indonesian archipelago with a total area of 416,129 km 2 that constitutes millions of living organisms. Several natural resources are still in pristine condition and these lands are abundantly covered by thousands of plant types. The island where one of the oldest tropical forests in Asia and the Pacific is preserved, has the potential to support all living activities (Takeuchi et al., 2003;Lekitoo et al., 2017). The fact that native people and tribes have benefited from the forest and environment over many generations is the key element on how the forest's support for living is tangible (Klute, 2008). More than 200 tribes and traditional communities live in Papua, and most of them continue to depend on the forest. This is in the portrait of current living in interdependency with forests (Cabuy et al., 2012).
The support of the forest for relentless use of plant sources is fundamentally important, not only for balancing the natural ecosystem, but more importantly, it has been sustainably providing multibenefit incomes in the social aspects of people's lives. The people who live and frequently interact with the forest have mostly benefited during their lifetime (Ros-Tonen et al., 2003). Multiple commodities were provided from the surrounding forest: staple foods, complementary foods and beverages, medicine, housing construction materials, clothes, and other daily components of the local lifestyle. This phenomenon occurred due to a legacy of traditional belief in which forests and the whole set of natural components are a fundamental heritage from ancestors and should be Species Richness of Yapen Island for Sustainable Living Benefit in Papua, Indonesia preserved as well as managed in appropriate and sustainable ways (Wollenberg and Ingles, 1998;Morsello et al., 2012). However, the extraction of forest commodities in Papua is varied and depends on a tribe's background, living area, geographical status, etc. Such different circumstances lead to different forest utilization patterns among tribes and forest communities, as well as their future perspectives towards the long-term benefits of forests in Papua.
Therefore, the objective of this study was to identify the forest plants intended for main and complementary components of living in Natabui and Papuma villages of Yapen Island in Indonesian New Guinea. For clarity, the term forest plant used in this study describes all plant species belonging to vascular and non-vascular plants, plant life forms and plant categories which were found during the field study. The study result will eventually provide a better understanding of forest plant distribution and how those plants contributed to living in traditional communities in Indonesian New Guinea. Although the data used were quite old, the significant impact of these data and the information on the use of forest vegetation in both areas will be very valuable at present since no study or research have been done so far in terms of identifying the forest benefits to the community. In addition, the data and analysis results from this study will be a fundamental contribution for governments and related stakeholders to design a better management for the forest resources and manage a sustainable living benefit as a solution for the communities in the area. This research outcome will provide a real solution from government to design forest and agro-based diversification program such as agroforestry to support food availability as well as keep the forest ecosystem in the good shape. Moreover, related stakeholders such as NGO's will be able to determine specific food diversification practices for locals to be more sustainable with their edible natural forest resources.
In addition, the contribution of the study will promote high diversity of tropical plant species and its distribution based on the geographical area across the world. Therefore, it will reveal the tropical forest contribution towards traditional living benefit in Indonesian New Guinea which is fundamental to set up a long-term program and policy toward the existence and benefit in both forest vegetation and communities. Hence, even though the study was done in 2011, this study information, due to its pivotal contribution, is considerably important to disseminate through an academic publication.

Study area
The study area was situated in the low land tropical forest of Yapen Island in Indonesia New Guinea which lies between -2°2,4'8,424" and -1°23,4'19,548" South latitude, and between 134°56'21,708" and 137°4,2'20,592" East longitude (Center of Statistics Agency, 2018). Two villages, namely Papuma and Natabui were chosen to conduct this study with a duration of 2 months during the summer of 2011. In general, both preferred study locations are in the same island of Yapen and close in terms of distance. Both locations had the same annual rainfall (1500 mm/ year), temperature range (27-34 °C), relative humidity (75-87%). In terms of geographical landscape, Natabui village is higher and relatively far from the coastal area, while Papuma is dominant in the lower area and close to the coastal area. Besides, both areas are still considered to be forested with the forest cover of more than 70%. The condition then effected the forest vegetation which is almost alike in both villages.

Sample methods
The descriptive method involving deep-interview and discussion was used in this study. Both deep-interview and discussion are based on semi-structural questionnaires. In detail, there were four key questions: 1) How often do local communities interact with the surrounding forests and plant resources? 2) What is the benefit of the plant resources from the forest? 3) How difficult is it to harvest the plant resource? and 4) What is the future prospect of the availability of plant resources, based on traditional perspectives in both villages? These questions were modified and designed based on the previous study by Aronggear (2010) that were carried out in the both communities regarding non-timber forest products as well as other numerous semi-formal discussions that related to the use of forest resources for fulfilling daily needs across several forest communities in Papua. These questions were determined based on the most daily activities in the community and pre-discussion responses that were carried out before the study was undertaken. From the all data collected during the interviews and discussions were used to generate a trend of interaction in both villages.

Respondent preference
In order to obtain the questionnaire data, respondents were selected based on the frequency of interaction with the surrounding forest and their socio-cultural role in the community. The authors decided to choose 20% from the total population of both villages. Sampling is quite effective when dealing with a large ethnobotany study (Tongco, 2007). Therefore, a total of 70 people (n = 70) (20% of the total population) were chosen to be respondents from both villages. These participants were then classified as village's leaders (10), religious leaders (4), or as zestfully active and inactive gardeners (56) who have experience with the plant resources.

Data collection
All the data were recorded and converted to a quantitative system through a scoring from 0 to 10 based on the study by Sandelowski et al. (2009). Some modifications to the scoring system were made in this study for a better representation of the data (Whitehead and Schneider, 2012). For the frequent use aspect, 0 represented lesser use and 10 represented the highest consumption of forest plants; for the aspect of benefit contribution of various plant sources, 0 indicated lesser benefit and 10 indicated the greatest benefit; for the aspect of difficulty of access, 0 was the most difficult and 10 was the easiest collection of plant sources; for the future prediction scenario of plant source availability, 0 indicated the highest threat and 10 indicated the least threatened of forest plants.

Data analysis
In order to quantify the distribution of forest plant life forms based on the growing habitat, a simple histogram was prepared. For the frequent plant uses based on plant life forms and plant categories in distributions, the Kruskal Wallis test was applied using dplyr and ggpubr packages. In addition to understanding the correlation among frequency, benefit, access, and sustainability of use of forest plants in both villages, a correlation analysis was calculated and performed using corrplot package. These data were calculated using R statistical program (R Development Core Team, 2018).

RESULTS
Local people in both villages extracted 64 types of forest plants from 33 families. In terms of plant life form, these consisted of 8 palm species, 14 perennial herb species, 4 climbing herb species, 2 liana species, 17 tree species, 4 bamboo species, 4 fern species, 3 shrub species, and 8 mushroom species. In addition to the plant category, these were classified as 36 monocotyledon species, 16 dicotyledon species, 4 pteridophyte species, and 8 thallophyte species (Figure 3). Most of these plants were consumed daily as food whereas some were used for traditional medicine, housing construction, and as food complements.
It was obvious that the monocotyledon species were preferable to the dicotyledon species for both villagers. In the Natabui village, there were a total of 36 species from 17 families that came from the monocotyledon class. Next, dicotyledon use totaled 16 species from 13 families, and thallophytes and pteridophytes were the least consumed with only 12 species from 6 families.
In terms of geographical plant distribution and preference, most consumed plants were taken from the low land forest areas (<400 masl). For the preference of plant life form consumed, trees became were the most numerous consumed plants with a total of 17 species. The consumption of tree materials was followed by perennial herbs finally, lianas with only two species (Figure 1). For the plant category, monocotyledon was the dominant form of consumable (36 species) compared to dicotyledons (16 species), pteridophytes (4 species), and thallophytes (8 species) ( Figure  2). From a total of 64 species of consumed plants, the leaf parts were preferred with 28 species. The second most frequently consumed plant portion was the fruit with about 19 species and the third was sprout emanating from five species, and other minor portions were seeds and piths.
In order to understand the broader scope of intent, benefits gained from various forest species, difficulty of access, and prospects for the future availability, a Spearman correlation among these variables was generated based on scoring data set obtained from community respondents. A strong positive correlation (0.6453) was indicated between frequency of use and benefit value gained for most respondents in both villages, while a strong negative correlation was observed between the benefit value and accessibility of certain species (-0.2646). In addition, a strong negative correlation was noticed between frequency of use and the future prospect of forest species availability (-0.1405) (Figure 4).

DISCUSSION
Plant resources represent substantial benefits and play a pivotal role in the existence of local communities in both the Papuma and Natabui villages in Yapen Island. In terms of landscape preference for harvesting, it was obvious that the local communities were more likely to yield various plant resources in the lowland forest (<600 masl) which generally tends to be a relatively even landscape with a slope lesser than 20°. Ecologically more dominant plant life forms and categories, in particular palm, perennial herb, climbing herb, grass, and several other monocotyledon were spread below 700 masl (Whitmore, 1998;Huang et al., 2003). Keppel et al. (2005) found as many as 560 indigenous species of vascular plants (52% endemic) in the low land tropical rain forest of Viti Levu, Fiji. In addition, a high number of soil nutrients in the lowland forest of Yapen Island was observed, with a high amount of substrate also abundantly found in the two lowland forest areas, presumably indicating a potential regeneration of plant growth compared The tendency to choose monocotyledons was driven by their wider distribution and growth dominance in the lowland forest and landscape. Bognounou et al. (2011) highlighted that monocotyledons were more diverse and higher in density than dicotyledons in both primary and secondary forests of Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica. Apart from these, several plants have been pivotal for daily consumption and function as staple food and essential vegetables. Meanwhile, dicotyledons have been prioritized solely  However, a small portion was preferred as food.
Thallophytes and pteridophytes contribute as additional nutrients and improve daily diets. Rasingam and Parthasarathy (2008) revealed that herbs, shrubs, and grasses have been the dominant species growing densely in the lowland forest in Little Andaman Island, India. However, the dominance of monocotyledon species can be a glaring indication of ecological degradation in the ecosystem (Granville, 1984). The basic rationale for the local inhabitants in both villages to prefer tree was that a whole tree could provide multiple benefits ranging from timber for construction and, fire, shoes/clothing, home furnishing, and daily diet for local inhabitants (Michon, 2005 noted a high intensity of leaves consumed on the household scale which was more than once a week in Yaounde, southern Cameroon. Concerning the consumption pattern, 13 species (20.4%) of forest plants could be directly consumed and 51 species (79.6%) were processed through cooking methods. The predominance of indirect uses means local communities prefer variation towards final products of edible plants. By cooking, the taste, shape and nutrient components will be different. Most of indirect edible products were produced using the leaves and starch (FAO, 2011;Nowak, 2017). Frequent directly consumed parts of forest plants were sprouts growing from several palms, perennial herbs, trees species, and young leaves (Márton et al., 2010;Maroyi, 2014).
It has been a fact that more interactions with the forest will render more foods and other complementary goods (Sonbait et al., 2018). Colfer et al. (2006) found that a good diet requires food availability and can often be a result of interaction with the forest. In terms of the economic income, the use of basic forest plants can be a source of money, which can be spent toward the improvement of local households' life (Neumann and Hirsch, 2000;Eastin et al., 2011). Vinceti et al. (2013) indicated the importance of edible forest foods obtained overtime because they consistently fulfilled the locals' necessities, rather than solely in a particular period. On the contrary, high frequency of forest access and plant consumption eventually will attenuate the overall potency of forest biodiversity and edible resources in both villages (-0.1405). Therefore, a potential alternative of better forest resource management such as community forest will increase the future prospect of forest sustainability (Dhakal et al., 2016). Mitchell et al. (2003) pointed out the negative effect on the ecological landscape and natural regeneration of flowering when the nut and fruits were extracted overtime with the high frequency.

CONCLUSION
The distribution of forest plants that are consumed was assessed by evaluating the species contribution toward local living benefit in two villages, Papuma and Natabui. Semi-structural interviews were carried out to determine how intense the collection was, what the value of the benefits from the plant resources was, the accessibility of the plants, and the prospects for the future sustainability of the surrounding forest plants for inhabitants in both villages. The results indicate that various life forms and categories of forest plants have significant contributions particularly to the daily food supply for diet. Spearman correlation indicated a strong positive correlation between the frequency of interaction and value of the benefit gained from surrounding forest, where a strong negative correlation was shown regarding the correlation between the accessibility of forest plants and value of the benefit gained.