Page 20 - GS58346 Tasik Chini

EFFECT OF OIL PALM PLANTATION IN TASIK CHINI

Monoculture effect

• Monoculture plantation only harbor a single species, these areas don’t support a diverse collection
of animals or other plants. This throws the ecosystem out of balance and makes it susceptible to
serious problems. For example, some of the insects living in monoculture farms may not have any
predators at all, which allows their populations to grow out of control.

• Monoculture oil palm plantations could significantly reduce arthropod biodiversity in comparison to
the native forests (Bruhl and Eltz, 2010; Luke et al., 2014)

• Oil palm plantations have been found to contain a lower species richness of butterfly and birds
(Koh and Wilcove, 2008). It will effect the mitigation of birds in Tasik Chini areas.

• Furthermore. monoculture is also a threat to soil degradation in other ways. The continued
degradation of soil is making it unusable for agriculture. Clearing of forests to provide new land will
follow with the damaging cycle set to repeat.

Agriculture runoff

• Agricultural run-off is categorized as the non-point source pollution. These pollutants are
transported through soil by rainwater

• Run-off of nutrients especially Phosphorus will lead to eutrophication and change taste and odor of
the water. Aquatic life will kill in the lake because of deoxygenation of water. Other than that, it will
cause ecological system dysfunctional by the loss of top predators due to growth inhibition and
failure of reproduction.

• The use of herbicides is known as an economical practice to control weed in plantations of
industrial crops such as oil palm as they reduce reliance on manpower for manual weeding. One of
the most common herbicides used in oil palm plantation is glyphosate. Levels of glyphosate and its
main metabolite were determined in surface water, soil and sediment samples from an oil palm
plantation area located at Tasik Chini.