Forest Research Institute Malaysia - Historic Moments - Built, War and The Establishment

Built, War and The Establishment

At the time when the country's lowlands were still covered by large tracts of virgin forest, and the forest of the hill and montane areas were pristine, the selected a denuded landscape for their project.

They chose as their main task what must have been irrelevant to that time -The Rebuilding of A Forest Ecosystem From Scratch. Little did they realise that as the century drew to a close, this would be an experiment all too desperately needed, in the context of the often damaged and degraded forest heritage we find ourselves nursing back to health today. In 1926, the Chief Conservator of Forest (equivalent to today's Director of Forestry), G.E.S Cubitt, asked Dr. F.W. Foxworthy to established a separate forest research unit for the Forestry Department. It was Foxworthy who selected the present site, at Kepong. He was also to become the Institutes's first Chief Research Officer. The site comprised an area that was practically stripped of its original forest cover except for a few remnant trees at the more inaccessible localities. Lalang-grass scrub on the hillsides made way to vegetable terraces on the lower slopes, while the valley cradled a few ponds, the left-overs of a past tin-mining operation. Within two years in 1928, the first 42 hectares of experimental plantation (mainly Dipterocarps, tall hardwood species) were in place, carefully nurtured into being using "nurse" trees of other species as shade and food providers (being nitrogen -fixers). By the time the construction of the main building had begun. Completed the following years, this building was to remain the sole centre for the laboratories, Herbarium, and Museum, as well as the Chemistry, Zoology and Sivilculture sections of the Institute, until new buildings were added after World War II. The Herbarium collection that was also moved to Kepong, numbered a modest 1,500 accessions. The end of the decade saw some 125 hectares of plantation established at the Institute. Plantation trials with exotic species started in the early 1930s. The plantations covered 154 hectares just before the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939, and before the Japanese Occupation of the ] in 1941–1945. By this time the Dipterocarp and non-Dipterocarp arboreta contained 75 species (represented by 360 individual trees), while the Herbarium collection numbered nearly 40,000 accessions.