IF YOU can't beafem, join 'em. Ecologists are working with the very people who would seem their sworn enemies - rainforest loggers. A huge deforestation programme is going ahead anyway, so the aim is to exploit it to conduct one of the world's biggest ecological experiments. Yayasan Sabah - the Sabah Foundation, a Malaysian state-owned company - is clearing 75,000 hectares of primary rainforest on the island of Borneo and converting the land to palm-oil plantation. Their unlikely colleagues are a team led by Rob Ewers at Imperial College London, who are working with the loggers on an experiment into the ecological effects of habitat fragmentation.
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