Social media has become a surprisingly valuable tool for wildlife biologists, with a variety of new species described following posts by curious members of the public seeking to identify unknown organisms.
In a letter to the journal Oryx published on 8 September 2023, Enggal Primananda and Iyan Robiansyah of the Research Center for Plant Conservation of the Indonesian National Research and Innovation Agency, report the discovery of a new population of the Critically Endangered rainforest tree Dipterocarpus littoralis based upon posts on the social media sites Facebook and Instagram.
Dipterocarpus littoralis had been thought to be restricted to the West Nusakambangan Nature Reserve on the western tip of Nusakambangan Island, which lies of the south coast of Central Java, where the known trees are found in a hilly forest at an altitude of about 100 m above sealevel.
The social media posts show a group of fruits and leaves which Primananda and Robiansyah believe clearly belong to Dipterocarpus littoralis, which were found in Tasikmalaya in West Java, about 70 km to the west of the West Nusakambangan Nature Reserve.
If this identification is correct, then it indicates a significant range extension for Dipterocarpus littoralis, which may require a revision of its conservation status. Primananda and Robiansyah recommend that this new population be investigated as a matter of some urgency, and that specimens from the new location be added to the collection at Bogor Botanic Gardens.
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