Identifying forest ecosystem regions for agricultural use and conservation

ABSTRACT Balancing agricultural needs with the need to protect biodiverse environments presents a challenge to forestry management. An imbalance in resource production and ecosystem regulation often leads to degradation or deforestation such as when excessive cultivation damages forest biodiversity. Lack of information on geospatial biodiversity may hamper forest ecosystems. In particular, this may be an issue in areas where there is a strong need to reassign land to food production. It is essential to identify and protect those parts of the forest that are key to its preservation. This paper presents a strategy for choosing suitable areas for agricultural management based on a geospatial variation of Shannon's vegetation diversity index (SHDI). This index offers a method for selecting areas with low levels of biodiversity and carbon stock accumulation ability, thereby reducing the negative environmental impact of converting forest land to agricultural use. The natural forest ecosystem of the controversial 1997 Ex-Mega Rice Project (EMRP) in Indonesia is used as an example. Results showed that the geospatial pattern of biodiversity can be accurately derived using kriging analysis and then effectively applied to the delineation of agricultural production areas using an ecological threshold of SHDI. A prediction model that integrates a number of species and families and average annual rainfall was developed by principal component regression (PCR) to obtain a geospatial distribution map of biodiversity. Species richness was found to be an appropriate indicator of SHDI and able to assist in the identification of areas for agricultural use and natural forest management

TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits—almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives

Mapping the potential distribution of plants and animals for wildlife management: the use of the DOMAIN software package

An adequate knowledge of species distribution and performance is fundamental to effective wildlife management. In the majority of cases where known distributions are very limited, other means of acquiring information may be needed to model the potential distribution of species of management concern. This paper briefly reviews some available software packages including the recent ‘Windows’ version of DOMAIN developed at CIFOR. Unlike some other potential mapping packages, the DOMAIN program can work efficiently with relatively few known distribution points. These are correlated with the values of other spatially referenced, environmental variables such as elevation, soils, vegetation type and climate that are considered to influence species distribution. A habitat envelope or environmental domain is then computed based on these correlates. The algorithm then matches the template with the known environmental values for all pixels in the area under study and maps out similarity classes. In this way a rapid appraisal of the potential distribution of one or more species can be made for any area where there are available relevant, spatially referenced environmental data. A case study from Central Sumatra demonstrates how the method may be used to generate maps of plant species diversity or richness

A field manual for rapid vegetation survey and classification for general purpose

The purpose of the manual is to introduce vegetation classification and survey to those with limited botanical or ecological experience. The kinds of people for whom the engaged in policy development to research workers, teachers and students. Apart from providing some background on classification concepts and procedures, section I is designed specifically to introduce the Vegclass windows based software that forms the core of the manual and to demonstrate how the software can be used to describe and classify vegetation for a range of purposes. The software facilitates both data entry and summary tables of the site physical, vegetation structural, plant species and plant functional data. It also includes a facility to produce graphs on demand and is capable of producing new, ecological measures of stand diversity based on plant functional attributes. Section ii contains a step by step introduction to data entry, coupled with an in-built, error checking protocol that will help introduce the new user to the methods used to compile, tabulate and analyse the data

A generic plant functional attribute set and grammar for dynamic vegetation description and analysis.

Conventional method of vegetation description rarely convey the behavioural of response based information needed to describe effectively the world's vegetation for conservation and management purposes. The information required for these purposes may be derived from generic set of plant functional attributes (PFAs) as described in this paper. A grammar provides a syntactic rule base for generating and comparing individuals model or modi based on specific PFA combiantions. The method facilitaties rapid and uniform assessment of plant response to variation in the physical environment at differing spatial scales independently of species. This is illustrated by local, regional and global case studie

A generic plant functional attribute set and grammar for vegetation description and analysis

Conventional descriptive methods rarely convey the behavioural information needed to conserve and manage the world's vegetation. Such information may be derived from a generic set of plant functional attributes (PFAs). A grammar provides a syntactic rule base for generating and comparing coherent models of individual plant behaviour based on PFA combinations rather than discrete attributes. The method facilitates rapid and uniform assessment of plant response to environmental change at varying spatial scales regardless of species

Assessing biodiversity at landscape level in northern Thailand and Sumatra (Indonesia): the importance of environmental context

Most biodiversity assessment methods tend to sample isolated areas of land cover such as closed forest or local land use mosaics. Contemporary methods of assessing biodiversity are briefly reviewed and focus on the relative roles of the Linnean species and plant functional types (PFTs). Recent case studies from central Sumatra and northern Thailand indicate how the range distributions of many plant and animal species and functional types frequently extend along regional gradients of light, water and nutrient availability and corresponding land use intensity. We show that extending the sampling context to include a broader array of environmental determinants of biodiversity results in a more interpretable pattern of biodiversity. Our results indicate sampling within a limited environmental context has the potential to generate highly truncated range distributions and thus misleading information for land managers and for conservation. In an intensive, multi-taxa survey in lowland Sumatra, vegetational data were collected along a land use intensity gradient using a proforma specifically designed for rapid survey. Each vegetation sample plot was a focal point for faunal survey. Whereas biodiversity pattern from samples within closed canopy rain forest was difficult to interpret, extending the sample base to include a wider variety of land cover and land use greatly improved interpretation of plant and animal distribution. Apart from providing an improved theoretical and practical basis for forecasting land use impact on biodiversity, results illustrate how specific combinations of plant-based variables might be used to predict impacts on specific animal taxa, functional types and above-ground carbon. Implications for regional assessment and monitoring of biodiversity and in improving understanding of the landscape dynamics are briefly discussed

Rapid ecological assessment Kerinci Seblat National Park buffer zone: report on plant ecology.

A Rapid Ecological Assessment (REA) was undertaken in two logging concessions bounding the Kerinci Seblat National Park in Central Sumatra. The REA was implemented by WWF Indonesia and funded by the World Bank. CIFOR together with LIPI advised on survey method as part of a wider study involving biodiversity assessment in the Jambi Province. An international team investigated biodiversity pattern in vascular plant species and plant functional groups, insects (mainly butterflies, moths, dung beetles and carabids), herpetofauna (amphibians and reptiles), bats, rodents, large mammals and birds. Unusually restrictive logistics reduced the number of sites to approximately half that needed for a statistical analysis. Results indicate that while plant species and functional richness vary directly with elevation, fauna show a reverse trend. The paper comments on ways of improving logging practices to conserve biodiversity. New global levels of species and functional richness were recorded for several sites. Any future baseline study will require a wider sample of land cover types