Targeted Conservation to Safeguard a Biodiversity Hotspot from Climate and Land-Cover Change

Abstract

Responses of biodiversity to changes in both land cover and climate are recognized [1] but still poorly understood [2]. This poses significant challenges for spatial planning as species could shift, contract, expand, or maintain their range inside or outside protected areas [2-4]. We examine this problem in Borneo, a global biodiversity hotspot [5], using spatial prioritization analyses that maximize species conservation under multiple environmental-change forecasts. Climate projections indicate that 11%-36% of Bornean mammal species will lose ≥ 30% of their habitat by 2080, and suitable ecological conditions will shift upslope for 23%-46%. Deforestation exacerbates this process, increasing the proportion of species facing comparable habitat loss to 30%-49%, a 2-fold increase on historical trends. Accommodating these distributional changes will require conserving land outside existing protected areas, but this may be less than anticipated from models incorporating deforestation alone because some species will colonize high-elevation reserves. Our results demonstrate the increasing importance of upland reserves and that relatively small additions (16,000-28,000 km(2)) to the current conservation estate could provide substantial benefits to biodiversity facing changes to land cover and climate. On Borneo, much of this land is under forestry jurisdiction, warranting targeted conservation partnerships to safeguard biodiversity in an era of global change.

Estimating biodiversity impacts without field surveys: A case study in northern Borneo

“…Borneo is projected to experience annual maximum temperature increases above the global average and increased precipitation variability under a 2°C temperature increase (Johnson 2012). One recent study finds that as many as 49 % of mammalian species in Borneo will lose more than a third of their habitat by 2080 when climate and deforestation impacts are considered together, a twofold increase over historical trends (Struebig et al 2015). With suitable ecological conditions predicted to shift upslope for many of these species, preserving upland forest areas, such as those inundated by the three reservoirs examined in this analysis, takes on additional significance.…”

Diversity and determination of wildlife ‘umbrella species’ in the Gunung Leuser National Park

“…PENDAHULUAN Hutan merupakan ekosistem penting untuk mendukung konservasi keanekaragaman hayati, terutama satwaliar (Tripathi et al, 2010;Gibson et al, 2011;Struebig et al, 2015). Satwaliar adalah semua binatang yang masih mempunyai sifat-sifat liar, baik yang hidup bebas maupun yang dipelihara oleh manusia (Departemen Kehutanan, 1990).…”

Restoration planning of degraded tropical forests for biodiversity and ecosystem services

“…We employed recently developed habitat suitability map of 81 mammal species (Struebig et al, 2015b) belonging to three groups: carnivores (23 species), primates (13 species) and bats (45 species). Struebig et al (2015b) employed the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) algorithm (Phillips and Dudík, 2008) to map an environmental envelope for each species using bioclimatic variables (i.e. climates, topographic, and distances to water, wetlands and limestone karst).…”

“…climates, topographic, and distances to water, wetlands and limestone karst). Struebig et al (2015b) then corrected the resultant environmental envelope map with mammal sensitivity to land cover (Wilting et al, 2010) and through experts verification to produce habitat suitability map for each species. For our analysis, we used a habitat suitability map with strict treatment of possible omission errors (i.e.…”

“…As such, we assumed that restoration would fully recover the degraded areas to their pre-1950 condition. Historically suitable habitat was spatially modelled using the MaxEnt algorithm (Phillips and Dudík, 2008) and bioclimatic variables as predictors (Struebig et al, 2015b), and was then corrected with historical land cover (Struebig et al, 2015a). We employed a strict commission error threshold of 25% to assign habitat suitability of restored site into binary category.…”