Although deforestation and forest degradation have long been considered the most significant threats to tropical biodiversity, across Southeast Asia (Northeast India, Indochina, Sundaland, Philippines) substantial areas of natural habitat have few wild animals (>1 kg), bar a few hunting-tolerant species. To document hunting impacts on vertebrate populations regionally, we conducted an extensive literature review, including papers in local journals and reports of governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Evidence from multiple sites indicated animal populations declined precipitously across the region since approximately 1980, and many species are now extirpated from substantial portions of their former ranges. Hunting is by far the greatest immediate threat to the survival of most of the region’s endangered vertebrates. Causes of recent overhunting include improved access to forests and markets, improved hunting technology, and escalating demand for wild meat, wildlife-derived medicinal products, and wild animals as pets. Although hunters often take common species, such as pigs or rats, for their own consumption, they take rarer species opportunistically and sell surplus meat and commercially valuable products. There is also widespread targeted hunting of high-value species. Consequently, as currently practiced, hunting cannot be considered sustainable anywhere in the region, and in most places enforcement of protected-area and protected-species legislation is weak. The international community’s focus on cross-border trade fails to address overexploitation of wildlife because hunting and the sale of wild meat is largely a local issue and most of the harvest is consumed in villages, rural towns, and nearby cities. In addition to improved enforcement, efforts to engage hunters and manage wildlife populations through sustainable hunting practices are urgently needed. Unless there is a step change in efforts to reduce wildlife exploitation to sustainable levels, the region will likely lose most of its iconic species, and many others besides, within the next few years. © 2016, Society for Conservation Biology..
Tag: biodiversity
Projecting Global Biodiversity Indicators under Future Development Scenarios
To address the ongoing global biodiversity crisis, governments have set strategic objectives and have adopted indicators to monitor progress toward their achievement. Projecting the likely impacts on biodiversity of different policy decisions allows decision makers to understand if and how these targets can be met. We projected trends in two widely used indicators of population abundance Geometric Mean Abundance, equivalent to the Living Planet Index and extinction risk (the Red List Index) under different climate and land-use change scenarios. Testing these on terrestrial carnivore and ungulate species, we found that both indicators decline steadily, and by 2050, under a Business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, geometric mean population abundance declines by 18-35% while extinction risk increases for 8-23% of the species, depending on assumptions about species responses to climate change. BAU will therefore fail Convention on Biological Diversity target 12 of improving the conservation status of known threatened species. An alternative sustainable development scenario reduces both extinction risk and population losses compared with BAU and could lead to population increases. Our approach to model species responses to global changes brings the focus of scenarios directly to the species level, thus taking into account an additional dimension of biodiversity and paving the way for including stronger ecological foundations into future biodiversity scenario assessments. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Quantifying the relative irreplaceability of important bird and biodiversity areas
World governments have committed to increase the global protected areas coverage by 2020, but the effectiveness of this commitment for protecting biodiversity depends on where new protected areas are located. Threshold- and complementarity-based approaches have been independently used to identify important sites for biodiversity. We brought together these approaches by performing a complementarity-based analysis of irreplaceability in important bird and biodiversity areas (IBAs), which are sites identified using a threshold-based approach. We determined whether irreplaceability values are higher inside than outside IBAs and whether any observed difference depends on known characteristics of the IBAs. We focused on 3 regions with comprehensive IBA inventories and bird distribution atlases: Australia, southern Africa, and Europe. Irreplaceability values were significantly higher inside than outside IBAs, although differences were much smaller in Europe than elsewhere. Higher irreplaceability values in IBAs were associated with the presence and number of restricted-range species; number of criteria under which the site was identified; and mean geographic range size of the species for which the site was identified (trigger species). In addition, IBAs were characterized by higher irreplaceability values when using proportional species representation targets, rather than fixed targets. There were broadly comparable results when measuring irreplaceability for trigger species and when considering all bird species, which indicates a good surrogacy effect of the former. Recently, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has convened a consultation to consolidate global standards for the identification of key biodiversity areas (KBAs), building from existing approaches such as IBAs. Our results informed this consultation, and in particular a proposed irreplaceability criterion that will allow the new KBA standard to draw on the strengths of both threshold- and complementarity-based approaches. © 2016, Society for Conservation Biology.
Can coffee-based agroforestry system converse biodiversity? Rapid Agro-Biodiversity Appraisal (RABA) in the Kalikonto sub-watershed (Malang)
Generate income continuously without reducing soil fertility and low fertilizer application and other chemicals used.
Learning pathway: Course flows & blueprint
This course is a pivotal contribution to FAO’s vision of fostering a Better Environment, particularly focusing on Biodiversity for food and agriculture. Aligned with FAO’s strategic initiatives, the course is fortified by the approval of the FAO Strategy on Mainstreaming Biodiversity Across Agricultural Sectors and the 2021-23 Action Plan, emphasizing the importance of targeted policies and practices for sustainable use, conservation, and restoration of ecosystems.
Land cover characterization in West Sudanian savannas using seasonal features from annual landsat time series
With the increasing temporal resolution of medium spatial resolution data, seasonal features are becoming more readily available for land cover characterization. However, in the tropical regions, images can be severely contaminated by clouds during the rainy season and fires during the dry season, with possible effects to seasonal features. In this study, we evaluated the performance of seasonal features based on an annual Landsat time series (LTS) of 35 images for land cover characterization in West Sudanian savanna woodlands. First, the burnt areas were detected and removed. Second, the reflectance seasonality was modelled using a harmonic model, and model parameters were used as inputs for land cover classification and tree crown cover prediction using the random forest algorithm. Furthermore, to study the sensitivity of the approach to the burnt areas, we repeated the analyses without the first step. Our results showed that seasonal features improved classification accuracy significantly from 68.7% and 66.1% to 76.2%, and decreased root mean square error (RMSE) of tree crown cover predictions from 11.7% and 11.4% to 10.4%, in comparison to the dry and rainy season single date images, respectively. The burnt areas biased the seasonal parameters in near-infrared and shortwave infrared bands, and decreased the accuracy of classification and tree crown cover prediction, suggesting that burnt areas should be removed before fitting the harmonic model. We conclude that seasonal features from annual LTS improved land cover characterization performance, and the harmonic model, provided a simple method for computing annual seasonal features with burnt area removal. © 2016 by the authors.
A rural revival in Tanzania: how agroforestry is helping farmers to restore the woodlands in Shinyanga region
When President Julius Nyerere visited the Shinyanga Region in 1984 he was shocked by what he saw. Decades of deforestation and inappropriate land management had turned Shinyanga into the ‘Desert of Tanzania.’ The president immediately launched the Shinyanga Soil Conservation Programme, widely known by its Swahili acronym, HASHI. This booklet relates the remarkable story of what has happened since then. The HASHI project helped tens of thousands of smallholders to restore degraded land, and in doing so to significantly improve their incomes. One of the project’s great achievements was to revive a traditional system of land management which increases the supply of livestock fodder for use during the dry season. When the project began, there were just 600 ha of documented ngitili – enclosed fodder reserves – in the region. There are now thought to be over 500,000 ha of such reserves. The ngitili provide fuelwood and building timber as well as livestock fodder. Their rapid expansion has brought about a significant increase in biodiversity. Species that had disappeared decades ago are now returning. The economic benefits have also been considerable. One study calculated the total monthly value of benefits derived from the ngitili to be US$14 per person – a significant sum in rural Tanzania. The HASHI project also encouraged farmers to adopt a range of other agroforestry technologies, including the planting of woodlots, fodder banks and fertilizer trees. These, too, have yielded considerable environmental and economic benefits.
Tree diversity analysis: a manual and software for common statistical methods for ecological and biodiversity studies
The software accompanying the Tree Diversity Analysis manual was developed for the R 2.1.1 environment. Since the publication of the manual at the end of 2005, new versions of the base R and its accompanying packages have become available. These changes made it necessary to modify the Biodiversity R software. At the same time that these changes were implemented, the opportunity was taken to develop Biodiversity R into a package that can be installed and is documented in the same way as other R packages. Some new functions were integrated in the new version of the package. Functions that were not directly associated with the graphical user interface (GUI) provided by Biodiversity Rwere documented separately
Environmental services and land use change in Southeast Asia: from recognition to regulation or reward?
Awareness of environmental services and land use change in Southeast Asia is high among scientists, policymakers, and society. In the case of transboundary smoke, the level of awareness and concern in the region is high, but subsides in between periods of’crisis’. Although there is a rising level of awareness of habitat loss and associated loss of genetic diversity, the basic cause-effect relationships underlying the ecological roles of biodiversity are still debated. Degradation of watershed functions is the most mature of our three meso-scale environmental topics; indeed it shows signs of being’fossilized’ by vested interests in the present consensus. Land use planning and other regulatory approaches have had little success. Policy instruments for achieving meso-level environmental policy objectives through changing incentives such as payment schemes for environmental services, have not been tested widely in Southeast Asia (or anywhere else). Further research and experimentation needs to incorporate strategic consideration of processes and spatial scales of environmental impacts and resource governance.
Biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes—are we asking the right questions?
The assumed relationship between biodiversity or local richness and the persistence of ‘ecosystem services’ (that can sustain productivity on-site as well as off-site, e.g. through regulation of water flow and storage) in agricultural landscapes has generated considerable interest and a range of experimental approaches. The abstraction level aimed for, however, may be too high to yield meaningful results. Many of the experiments on which evidence in favour or otherwise are based are artificial and do not support the bold generalisations to other spatial and temporal scales that are often made. Future investigations should utilise co-evolved communities, be structured to investigate the distinct roles of clearly defined functional groups, separate the effects of between- and within-group diversity and be conducted over a range of stress and disturbance situations. An integral part of agricultural intensification at the plot level is the deliberate reduction of diversity. This does not necessarily result in impairment of ecosystem services of direct relevance to the land user unless the hypothesised diversity–function threshold is breached by elimination of a key functional group or species. Key functions may also be substituted with petro-chemical energy in order to achieve perceived efficiencies in the production of specific goods. This can result in the maintenance of ecosystem services of importance to agricultural production at levels of biodiversity below the assumed ‘functional threshold’. However, it can also result in impairment of other services and under some conditions the de-linking of the diversity–function relationship. Avoidance of these effects or attempts to restore non-essential ecosystem services are only likely to be made by land users at the plot scale if direct economic benefit can be thereby achieved. At the plot and farm scales biodiversity is unlikely to be maintained for purposes other than those of direct use or ‘utilitarian’ benefits and often at levels lower than those necessary for maintenance of many ecosystem services. The exceptions may be traditional systems where intrinsic values (social customs) continue to provide reasons for diversity maintenance. High levels of biodiversity in managed landscapes are more likely to be maintained for reasons of intrinsic, serependic (‘option’ or ‘bequest’) values or utilitarian (‘direct use’) than for functional or ecosystem service values. The major opportunity for both maintaining ecosystem services and biodiversity outside conservation areas lies in promoting diversity of land-use at the landscape and farm rather than field scale. This requires, however, an economic and policy climate that favours diversification in land uses and diversity among land users.