The project involved the collaboration of researchers specialising in anthropology, geography, Southeast Asian history, global history, area studies, political ecology, environmental economics, plant ecology, animal ecology, forest ecology, hydrology, ichthyology, geomorphology and life-cycle assessment.

Collectively, the transdisciplinary research addresses a number of vital questions. How are material cycles and food webs altered as a result of large-scale land-use change? How have new commodity chains emerged while older ones have disappeared? What changes are associated with such shifts? What are the relationships among these three elements-commodity chains, material cycles and food webs? Attempts to answer these questions led the team to go beyond the dichotomy of society and nature as well as human and non-human. Rather, the research highlights complex relational entanglements of the two worlds, abruptly and forcibly connected by human-induced changes in an emergent and compelling resource frontier in maritime Southeast Asia.

Chapters 'Commodification of Nature on the Plantation Frontier' and 'Into a New Epoch: The Plantationocene' are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.