Selective-logging and oil palm: Multitaxon impacts, biodiversity indicators, and trade-offs for conservation planning

Strong global demand for tropical timber and agricultural products has driven large-scale logging and subsequent conversion of tropical forests. Given that the majority of tropical landscapes have been or will likely be logged, the protection of biodiversity within tropical forests thus depends on whether species can persist in these economically exploited lands, and if species cannot persist, whether we can protect enough primary forest from logging and conversion. However, our knowledge of the impact of logging and conversion on biodiversity is limited to a few taxa, often sampled in different locations with complex land-use histories, hampering attempts to plan cost-effective conservation strategies and to draw conclusions across taxa. Spanning a land-use gradient of primary forest, once- and twice-logged forests, and oil palm plantations, we used traditional sampling and DNA metabarcoding to compile an extensive data set in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo for nine vertebrate and invertebrate taxa to quantify the biological impacts of logging and oil palm, develop cost-effective methods of protecting biodiversity, and examine whether there is congruence in response among taxa. Logged forests retained high species richness, including, on average, 70% of species found in primary forest. In contrast, conversion to oil palm dramatically reduces species richness, with significantly fewer primary-forest species than found on logged forest transects for seven taxa.Using a systematic conservation planning analysis, we show that efficient protection of primary-forest species is achieved with land portfolios that include a large proportion of logged-forest plots. Protecting logged forests is thus a cost-effective method of protecting an ecologically and taxonomically diverse range of species, particularly when conservation budgets are limited. Six indicator groups (birds, leaf-litter ants, beetles, aerial hymenopterans, flies, and true bugs) proved to be consistently good predictors of the response of the other taxa to logging and oil palm. Our results confidently establish the high conservation value of logged forests and the low value of oil palm. Cross-taxon congruence in responses to disturbance also suggests that the practice of focusing on key indicator taxa yields important information of general biodiversity in studies of logging and oil palm

Vision transformers (ViT) for blanket-penetrating sleep posture recognition using a Triple Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radar system

202307 bcchVersion of RecordRGCOthersDepartment of Biomedical Engineering; Research Institute for Smart Ageing; Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityPublishe

New non-randomised model to assess the prevalence of discriminating behaviour: a pilot study on mephedrone

The main advantages of the SSC over other indirect methods are: simple administration, completion and calculation, maximum use of the data and good face validity for all respondents. Owing to the key feature that respondents are not required to answer the sensitive question directly, coupled with the absence of forced response or obvious self-protective response strategy, the SSC has the potential to cut across self-protective barriers more effectively than other estimation models. This elegantly simple, quick and effective method can be successfully employed in public health research investigating compromising behaviours

Simultaneous multifunctional sorption of PFOS and Cr(VI) on activated carbon prepared by one-step microwave activation

Multifunctional sorbents, activated carbons (AC), were prepared by one-step microwave activation utilizing peanut shells and sunflower seed husks. The influence of the original particle size of raw materials on the yield and specific surface area of AC was studied, which reached 33.5 % and 1133.27 m(2)/g, respectively. The repetitive and competitive uptakes of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and chromium were applied to investigate the sorption properties of AC. The sorption mechanisms were demonstrated using sulfur Kedge X-ray absorption near edge structure analysis (XANES). In the repetitive experiment, AC made from peanut shells (AC(P05)) still retained 70 % removal efficiency of PFOS after the fourth sorption because sorbed PFOS might form a new organic phase that supplied effective sites for the hydrophobic partition of PFOS. However, the removal efficiency of Cr(VI) decreased dramatically from 60 to 11 % after the fourth uptake because electrostatic attraction was its only removal pathway. In the binary solutes system, AC(P05) possessed perfect sorption performance for both PFOS and Cr(VI), which were 885 and 192 mg/g, respectively. In the multivariate solutes system, the XANES spectra indicated that the thiol functional group existed in the resulting AC and a metal chelate was formed between thiol and Zn2+/Cu2+. Hence, the presence of Zn2+/Cu2+ further promoted the removal of PFOS and Cr(VI) through the electrostatic attraction between the anions and positive metal chelate