Jemaja Island is the most westerly of the main islands in the Anambas Islands Regency, part of the province of

Riau Islands The Riau Islands ( id, Kepulauan Riau) is a province of Indonesia. It comprises a total of 1,796 islands scattered between Sumatra, Malay Peninsula, and Borneo including the Riau Archipelago. Situated on one of the world's busiest shipping lan ...

within

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

. The island is administered (including small offshore islands) as three districts of the Regency.

Description

The island is located in the

Anambas Islands Anambas Islands Regency ( id, Kabupaten Kepulauan Anambas) is a small archipelago of Indonesia, located northeast of Batam Island in the North Natuna Sea between the Malaysian mainland to the west and the island of Borneo to the east. Geograp ...

in the

South China Sea The South China Sea is a marginal sea of the Western Pacific Ocean. It is bounded in the north by the shores of South China (hence the name), in the west by the Indochinese Peninsula, in the east by the islands of Taiwan and northwestern Phi ...

. Jemaja is close to the strategically important

Singapore Strait The Singapore Strait is a , strait between the Strait of Malacca in the west and the South China Sea in the east. Singapore is on the north of the channel, and the Indonesian Riau Islands are on the south. The two countries share a maritime ...

. The island is populated with several villages and is heavily vegetated, including thick

mangrove A mangrove is a shrub or tree that grows in coastal saline or brackish water. The term is also used for tropical coastal vegetation consisting of such species. Mangroves are taxonomically diverse, as a result of convergent evolution in severa ...

groves, and the waters off Jemaja are rich with corals.Prakoso, Gilar. "GIS Application for Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM) in Indonesia." PhD diss., UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND, 2016. The economy of Jemaja is small, but the island has been considered for increased economic investment to promote its use as a tourist destination. Several sources have noted that the island possesses beautiful beaches. The island has also been considered as a quarantine area for livestock. In the 2000s, the island was a center for pirate activity. From 2007 to 2017, 34 incidents of piracy/armed robbery at sea occurred off the Anambas Islands, some of which originated from Jemaja.

References

{{Indonesia-stub Islands of Indonesia Islands of the South China Sea