Where is the Central Catchment Nature Reserve?

All of us know where the Central Catchment Nature Reserve (CCNR) is. Or do we?

I was unable to find an accurate map showing the boundaries of the CCNR from the National Parks Board (link), Singapore Land Authority (Onemap.sg), and even Google Maps.

In the end, after some research, the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore (Master Plan 2008) and the Ministry of Defence (Singapore Topographic Map) seem to be the only two which got it right. Not surprising, considering the need for accuracy for land-use planning and navigation for the military respectively.

 

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Download the map of Central Catchment Nature Reserve

 

Unable to obtain a decent map, I decided to created one on my own. You may download the high-resolution map free at my Download page. Please email me if you find any discrepancies. I will be more than happy to correct it!

 

Some explanations of the legend are described below.

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Nature Reserve:	Other than Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, the rest of this category belong to CCNR. Note that CCNR also includes the reservoirs which it surrounds
Non-Reserve Forest:	Most of these areas are forest. Individual buildings within are excluded
Park:	MacRitchite Reservoir Park
Residential:	Mainly residential. Includes eateries and other commercial entities
Singapore Zoological Gardens:	Includes Night Safari, and the upcoming River Safari
Utility:	If you zoom into Google Earth at this patch, you can see satellite dishes with Singtel’s logo

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Having consistent and accurate information is important, especially when it involves the conservation of our fragile biodiversity. Already, the CCNR is already threatened by many developments and structures within and surrounding it; and it will continue to be faced with them in the future.

But, that will be a separate post for another day. Stay tuned!

 

The map was created using ArcGIS with the following resources:

• Google Earth Satellite Images
• Master Plan 2008
• Road layer was adapted from Cloudmade.com, which is in turned sourced from www.openstreetmap.org.

Singapore’s Sea Cucumbers: A Dichotomous Key

The last weekend has been especially exciting because of the inaugural Festival of Biodiversity organised by the National Parks Board.

For this festival, the South-east Asian Biodiversity Society set up a booth together with Lewin Education in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. There was a continuous flow of kids who love designing the free photo frames being distributed. We also took the opportunity to educate on-lookers about what we actually do. Being a young society, every single person we reach out to is important.

I was tasked to design a poster on a mini-project which I have been planning to do for awhile; identifying our local nameless sea cucumbers. The purpose of this poster is to basically let people know how I derive the identity of each sea cucumber, right down to their family level by using a simple Yes/No dichotomous key.

The key was generated based on my current knowledge of the families and species of sea cucumbers in Singapore. Note that the pictures of spicules are not unique to all species within the family as there are some that do not possess the spicule designs. I will not be surprised if one or two more families are added next time; upon which I might update the poster again.

But for now, everyone is free to download this poster free at the Downloads page at the horizontal navigation bar. For anyone who requires a higher resolution file for printing at A2/A1 size, please email me separately to request.

Many thanks to Ria, Lewin Education, and Carmen for contributing their valuable photographs, sponsoring the printing for the exhibition, as well as helping to design the poster respectively.

Flora of Pulau Semakau

Finally published! This latest Nature in Singapore article compiles a checklist all the flora found in the original Semakau (excluding seagrasses), 168 species in all. Also inside are descriptions of the habitats, past and present records, exotic and rare species.

You may download it by clicking on the picture (file size: 0.99Mb).

I realised that I had over-sharpened my photographs of the plants. Ugh…

Two Checklists of Singapore’s biodiversity

Two checklists were recently published by the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research. You may click on the pictures to download the online books.

The first is a list of all known algae species in Singapore, titled ‘A Checklist of the Algae of Singapore’, written by Pham Nguyet Minh et al, [2.00 MB]. Congrats Minh!

The second is the ‘Checklist of the Vascular Plant Species of the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve’, which is written by I. M. Tuner and K. S Chua [781 KB].

The good old days~

 

Dated 1970, selling at 60 cents~

When Ministry of Law and Ministry of National Development is of one entity~

Another new cucumber to Singapore’s list

KS have already blogged about this but I thought I will also do one just to feed my blog which I have been neglecting lately. :)

The pink spotted sea cucumber, seen quite for quite a awhile in our shores, finally have a name, Holothuria fuscocinera. Click on the picture above to access the article from Nature in Singapore, written by LN, KS and me.

I shall leave Ria, who will probably do a posting about this, to share the details.

Purple-under-a-stone identified

The ‘purple-under-a-stone’ sea cucumber as named in Ria’s wildfact sheets is identified as Afrocucumis africana! This was reported in a short note in Nature in Singapore which me, Lionel and some other friends from plant systematics lab did. You may click on the picture to download the free article.

We have another sea cucumber article in review (which was actually submitted before this paper, but for some reason delayed). Watch out for it!

A sneak preview: The Natural Heritage of Singapore 3rd Edition

The Natural Heritage of Singapore is out again! Revised and better than its previous two predecessors! I am not sure whether it is for sale yet, but at least, it should be available in the NUS Co-op bookstore now or within the next few days since I have seen cartons of them packed inside the shop. (Update: the book is on sale now in NUS Co-op)

This is my complementary copy which I got from the main author Prof Hugh Tan, for giving some contributions to the book. This time, the highlight in the cover page is our critically endangered Banded Leaf Monkeys (Presbytis femoralis).

I thought the publisher did a great job in revamping this new edition. The aesthetics has dramatically improved – from the black and white in the 1st edition to colour photos in the 2nd edition. Now, in the 3rd edition, the beginning of each chapter has a nice design and a nice symbol accompanies the page number. Word spacing is wider now and the font is changed from Times New Roman to this new font, which increases the ease of reading, at least for me & RY. The picture layout are neater also but some pictures I thought, could be bigger for better illustrations.

Content-wise, most of facts and figures have been updated, together with more information being added in several portions. Some erroneous text and organisation issues have also been corrected. A good improvement is that the references have now been placed after each chapter, reducing the ease of searching aimlessly among the lot in the past edition.

There is also an effort to put more pictures in the book. About 60 more photos are added and a lot of the old photos are also replaced with better quality ones. Alex also kindly helped to draw some nice maps using his superb skills with the GIS.

Some hardcore nature bloggers might find several pictures familiar, like KS’s sea fans in his East Coast post in his God’s wonderful creations blog.

Or RY’s mud lobster posting in his Tiderchaser blog.


This picture at the last page might be confusing but there is a meaning behind it. Can you guess it? For a hint, part of the answer is bolded in that chapter.

One thing to lament about is that this edition (Right) is much heavier and thicker than the last one (Left)! But then again, this shows how much our Singapore’s natural heritage has to offer right?

I will highly recommend this book for any lay person or student of biology as this is probably one of the most comprehensive and updated publication to learn about our natural history. I don’t make any money for making this post and the above remarks btw. :)

Lastly, as a contributor, I will naturally be slightly bias to praise it and would probably have miss out other things that could have made this book better. Looking forward to other reviews after this book is out.

Total Vascular Flora of Singapore!

Kwek Yan from the Plant Systematics Laboratory has just published an ebook in the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research entitled “A checklist of the total vascular plant flora of Singapore: native, naturalised and cultivated species.” You can download the book by clicking the picture below.

Kudos to him for his overwhelming efforts and many sleepless nights to compile this book. I am certain it will be of great help to many biologists and nature lovers for a quick reference of our species list and status in Singapore!