New conservation areas
To protect some of the richest biodiversity on the planet, the state of Sabah, Malaysia, decided to add an additional ~350,000 ha of new conservation areas. I helped co-lead a large project involving Malaysian and international partners, under the organization of the Malaysian NGO SEARRP, to determine where to locate these new conservation lands. We used best-available data and cutting-edge modeling to identify areas that maximize the protection of plants, animals, different forest ecosystems, and forest carbon. For Phase 2 of the project, Malaysian NGOs assessed attitudes towards the new conservation areas in nearby villages. The areas we identified for conservation will protect numerous threatened species and high forest carbon stocks, while also providing key landscape connectivity. Cumulatively the new lands are about the size of Glacier National Park, USA, but (with no disrespect to Glacier!) because they are tropical rainforest they protect ~10,000 times more biodiversity. The recommendations are currently being enacted by the Sabah Forestry Department and the state legislature.
Statewide connectivity plan
Using the results of our extensive field research, my colleagues Professor Mohd-Azlan Jayasilan (Universiti Malaysia Sarawak) and Dr. Jason Hon (World Wildlife Fund Malaysia) developed a connectivity plan for Sarawak, the largest state in the mega-biodiverse nation of Malaysia. We assessed the ecological importance of possible corridors across the state and identified the most important corridors whose protection would best support the persistence of threatened species like clouded leopards and orangutans. The most important corridors in all of Borneo were those that link the central parks of Sarawak (e.g. Hose Mountains and Mulu) and Kalimantan (e.g. Betung Kerihun and Kayan Mentarang). One of these, linking Mulu to Kayan Mentarang, has been protected via timber companies setting aside portions of their concessions. Protection of the other corridors is being achieved through the newly designated Baleh National Park and the proposed extensions to it that we are developing. Together these areas add <1% to the protected area coverage of Borneo, but our analysis suggests that they reduce the chances of extinction by an average of 10% for large mammal species by enhancing regional connectivity.
Strategic conservation and reforestation
Building on the success of our work in Sabah and Sarawak, we are now developing a strategic conservation and reforestation project to help the state of Perak, Malaysia, designate a suite of new protected areas and enhance landscape connectivity with the goals of securing the state’s tiger population and forest carbon stocks. This project is particularly exciting because it showcases how conservation needs to be conducted - at large scales, holistically, and with extensive collaboration and engagement throughout. With a diverse team of Malaysian and international partners, spearheaded by the Malaysian NGO SEARRP, we will use data and advanced analytics to optimize biodiversity protection, climate change mitigation, and human economy. Importantly, rather than focusing on status quo landscapes, we can determine how to improve key areas for biodiversity protection and connectivity via targeted reforestation.
Human dimensions of climate change
Climate change research and conservation plans focus on how rising temperatures or altered precipitation will directly affect organisms. But such abiotic changes may be much less important to biodiversity than interactions between novel environmental conditions and human behavior. For example, as forests dry out they could be more accessible to logging and more susceptible to human-lit fires. Without proper planning, the tens of millions of climate refugees could also have major impacts on biodiversity, especially in politically unstable regions. Mitigating such synergies will be critical to limiting climate change impacts and will require strategic planning based on optimization modeling and ecological data. Current work in our lab is exploring how climate-human interactions affect biodiversity across the globe, with the goal of identifying how alterations to land management practices and harvest management can reduce species' vulnerability to climatic variability.