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For Science Quickly, I'm Christopher and Doug Yachta.

Indonesia's more than 17,000 islands contain the largest

expansive tropical rainforest in Southeast Asia, and they're teaming to biodiversity.

These forests are just incredibly rich. Conservation scientist Eric Mayard has worked

for more than three decades in these forests. He heads up the scientific consulting company Borneo

Futures. Of course it's halten, sweaty, and humid, but there's so much diversity in these forests.

There is verticals everywhere. Everywhere you look, you see life. Bill Lawrence is a tropical

ecologist at James Cook University in Australia. Before us are just festooned with plants and

animals and birds and everything just chirping away, and it's just this giant bastion of life.

That life is on the brink, because Lawrence says Indonesia has an incredible concentration

of the world's endangered and critically endangered species. It's sort of an incredible

magical place, in one sense, but it's also a place that's greatly imperiled right now.

And then there's another sort of peril, one facing the scientists who do conservation work there.

That's the topic of a recent letter Lawrence and Mayard published in the journal Current Biology.

Writing by the couple Indonesian colleagues, they warn that conservation science in the

island nation is under threat. We were seeing colleagues and researchers that we knew and respected

...