Principal Investigator: Dr. Matthew Struebig
Project dates: 2012-2014
Funding: The Leverhulme Trust, UNEP Great Apes Survival Partnership
Collaborators: Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Zoologicial Society of London Indonesia Programme, Daemeter Consulting, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Queen Mary University of London, People and Nature Consulting International, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research
Both habitat destruction and climate change cause species distribution shifts and extinctions and are therefore major drivers of biodiversity loss. The relative versus combined consequences of these threats are highly debated, yet poorly understood, especially in the tropics where environmental impacts may be greater. There is clear scientific and practical need for research addressing interaction between these threats to inform conservation.
This project will inform biodiversity management over Borneo by modelling distributions and applying systematic conservation planning techniques to determine how mammal species might respond to land-cover and climate change. The project is in part funded under a Leverhulme Trust fellowship held jointly with Queen Mary University of London, with project partners in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. Outputs are designed to feed directly into the biodiversity components of biodiversity assessments (e.g. under the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, and REDD+), as well as informing environmental policy and conservation planning in the region. A nested project funded by UNEP focuses on the possible fate of the Borneo orang-utan under the same environmental forecasts.