Exploratory Review of Ecological Indicators in Oil Palm Cultivation Mohd Murshid Amir + , Nor Zalina Harun, and Khalilah Zakariya Department of Landscape Architecture, Kulliyyah of Architecture and Environmental Design, International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Abstract. Over the past 50 years, oil palm has become an important major crop in the agricultural sector in Southeast Asia. Its expansion is widely distributed in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. This phenomenon is response to the large increase in the world demand for vegetable oils and biofuel needs, which is expected to double by 2020. Oil palm industry can be seen as one of the key factors to contribute in establishing the economic that largely benefits major holders like estates companies and smallholders in rural areas. However, aside from the positive impacts of socioeconomic growth, rapid expansion of the oil palm industry has brought negative impacts to the environment particularly in the air, water, land, soil, habitat, biodiversity and landscape pattern. Through monocultures practices within the plantation, a lot of chemical fertilizers and pesticides are used, which contribute to a dramatic change of the environment that affect climate and human health. The effects of oil palm have been broadly discussed in Asia particularly pertaining social and environmental issues. Methods to assess the sustainability of oil palm cultivation to promote balance in the ecosystem that might loss during the conversion is still vague. Previous studies have researched on measuring the sustainability of oil palm cultivation through the development of indicators. However, there are still gaps in identifying the dimensions and levels of the relevant indicators. The indicators should be developed by referring to the present socioeconomic and ecological situation. Development of ecological indicators is important component in the sustainability of oil palm cultivation. This paper reviews the basic concepts of the current development of ecological indicators in oil palm cultivation through identifying relevant indicators and challenges for development and implementing the indicators. Keyword: ecological indicator, oil palm cultivation, environmental impact 1. Introduction In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in identifying and refining ecological indicators as tool to manage the sustainability of agricultural practices. Ecological indicators, be regarded as a resource management tool (Dale and Beyeler, 2001) as they are designed to assess processes and product that have value to people (National Research Council, 2000). The indicators are developed to meet the purpose of achieving sustainable agricultural practices that primarily focus on three main goals: economic profitability, environmental stewardship and social responsibility (Keating and Jacobson, 2012). Sustainability in agriculture often involves a complex concept, where numbers of research have been conducted to measure its sustainability. However, the basic viewpoint of its dimension is still unclear (Hayati et al., 2010). The most common method used to measure sustainability is by using indicators. This is an important tool to assess the sustainability of agricultural systems but it is not suitable for the assessment of new land use options without a guiding framework (Pearce et al. 1989). Schiller (2001), pointed that ecological indicators are important assessment to assess the condition of ecosystem developed by scientist. This view is supported by Niemi et al. (2002) where ecological indicator has an ability to detect anthropogenic change against background variability. Several attempts have been made to define ecological indicators, among them is “to assess the condition of the environment, to provide an early warning signal of changes in the environment, or to  Corresponding author Tel.: +60176948500 E-mail address: bohemiian_84@yahoo.com 42 2014 International Conference on Intelligent Agriculture IPCBEE vol.63 (2014) © (2014) IACSIT Press, Singapore DOI: 10.7763/IPCBEE. 2014. V63. 8