Sikundur 3D landscapes & primate habitat

Background Information

Tropical forests are being destroyed at a rate of 1.5 acres every second due to human activities, thereby accelerating climate change through impacts on the carbon cycle, and causing the extinction of species dependent on these habitats. In the face of such immediate and globally significant issues, there is a lack of robust scientific knowledge on how tropical deforestation and degradation affects ecosystem stability and the fauna that inhabit tropical forests. As anthropogenic disturbance removes available habitat for rainforest species and degrades remaining forests, a multitude of species are threatened. There is a need to develop methods to rapidly assess tropical forest structure and relate this to habitat quality for keystone species, like primates. Only upon understanding the impacts of forest degradation on forests and their inhabiting animals can effective conservation methods be planned.

Aim

This project will address the possible synergistic effects of forest degradation and climate change on primate species at a landscape scale. By collecting detailed structural vegetation, microclimate and soil data across various forest types with differing levels of disturbance, aerial vegetation surveys performed by low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used to extrapolate these detailed, small-scale data sets to a much wider area, and allow this data to be analysed in relation to its 3-dimensional properties. Similarly, primate behavioural data, and the 3-dimensional locations in which certain behaviours takes place will be collected to explore small-scale differences in forest used between primates inhabiting differing forest areas, which can then be inferred to larger scales by conducting population density surveys throughout the study site. Combining these data will enable a detailed investigation of forest degradation and its effect on arboreal primates at an unprecedented scale. Exploring these primate behavioural and population density data in relation to 3-dimenstional vegetation data will transform the understanding of how tropical forest degradation effects the fauna it contains. The true effects of anthropogenic disturbance on one of the most biodiverse areas in world will be understood at a greater detail and breadth than has been possible before, and continued monitoring of biodiversity indicators can be carried out by this project’s extensive and committed partners in Sumatra.

As well as exploring the interplay of ecological variables and anthropogenic disturbance on habitat ‘quality’ for primates, this project will also develop a low-cost methodology that will enable this, and future projects, to conduct ecological surveys of large areas of tropical forest, evaluating levels of degradation and the effect this may have on the fauna inhabiting them.