Few projects adequately address design and evaluation

Poaching for the pet trade is considered one of the main threats to orangutan survival, especially to the Bornean species (Pongo pygmaeus). However, there have been few attempts to quantify the number of individuals taken from the wild or to evaluate the drivers of the trade. Most orangutan poaching is thought to be opportunistic in nature, occurring in conjunction with deforestation for large-scale agriculture. Using data from our long-term wildlife crime field investigation program collected from 2004 to 2014, we evaluated the prevalence of orangutan poaching and its spatial distribution in and around Gunung Palung National Park, in the regencies (districts) of Ketapang and Kayong Utara, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Over the project period, investigators uncovered 145 cases of orangutans being illegally held captive for the pet trade. There was a significant correlation between the extent of oil palm and the number of cases reported from each sub-district in the landscape, supporting the widely held hypothesis that orangutan poaching is opportunistic, and we found no evidence of orangutan trading rings (i.e., international traders) targeting Gunung Palung National Park. Over the past decade, there only has been one prosecution of orangutan trading in West Kalimantan, and weak law enforcement by Indonesian authorities remains the most significant challenge in addressing wildlife trade. We offer four recommendations to address this, including that Indonesia dedicate at least $3 million more to addressing orangutan poaching and trade in Kalimantan and that the country's wildlife protection laws be revised and strengthened, with the new laws socialized to a wide audience, including government officials and all aspects of civil society. As oil palm begins to expand into Africa, this study also may help predict how this will affect gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos, encouraging proactive conservation action.

Disturbances fundamentally alter ecosystem functions, yet predicting their impacts remains a key scientific challenge. While the study of disturbances is ubiquitous across many ecological disciplines, there is no agreed-upon, cross-disciplinary foundation for discussing or quantifying the complexity of disturbances, and no consistent terminology or methodologies exist. This inconsistency presents an increasingly urgent challenge due to accelerating global change and the threat of interacting disturbances that can destabilize ecosystem responses. By harvesting the expertise of an interdisciplinary cohort of contributors spanning 42 institutions across 15 countries, we identified an essential limitation in disturbance ecology: the word ‘disturbance’ is used interchangeably to refer to both the events that cause, and the consequences of, ecological change, despite fundamental distinctions between the two meanings. In response, we developed a generalizable framework of ecosystem disturbances, providing a well-defined lexicon for understanding disturbances across perspectives and scales. The framework results from ideas that resonate across multiple scientific disciplines and provides a baseline standard to compare disturbances across fields. This framework can be supplemented by discipline-specific variables to provide maximum benefit to both inter- and intra-disciplinary research. To support future syntheses and meta-analyses of disturbance research, we also encourage researchers to be explicit in how they define disturbance drivers and impacts, and we recommend minimum reporting standards that are applicable regardless of scale. Finally, we discuss the primary factors we considered when developing a baseline framework and propose four future directions to advance our interdisciplinary understanding of disturbances and their social-ecological impacts: integrating across ecological scales, understanding disturbance interactions, establishing baselines and trajectories, and developing process-based models and ecological forecasting initiatives. Our experience through this process motivates us to encourage the wider scientific community to continue to explore new approaches for leveraging Open Science principles in generating creative and multidisciplinary ideas.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.