Edge effects of oil palm plantations on tropical anuran communities in Borneo

The expansion of industrial agriculture (oil palm) has significantly reduced lowland tropical diversity through direct loss or alteration of habitat, leading to habitat fragmentation and edge effects. Edge effects can have serious impacts on species diversity and community dynamics. To assess the effect of oil palm plantation edges on anuran communities in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, we surveyed anuran species and measured structural habitat and landscape parameters at 74 sites spread across forest and plantation habitats along the Kinabatangan River. We then evaluated how anuran species richness and assemblage composition varied in relation to these environmental parameters. Relative species richness was higher at forest sites, compared to oil palm plantation sites. Plantation sites were dominated by wide-ranging terrestrial species, and assemblage composition varied mostly in relation to standing surface water. Forest habitats supported both more endemic and arboreal species. Variability on anuran assemblage composition in forest habitats was greatest in relation to distance to forest edge followed by canopy density, which was also partially correlated with forest edge distance. Moreover, anuran species richness in forest habitats declined as proximity to the forest-plantation interface increased, and as canopy density decreased. Our study provides further evidence that oil palm plantations provide little conservation benefit to anurans. Furthermore, oil palm plantations appear to have adverse pervasive impacts on amphibian diversity considerable distances into adjacent forest areas. These findings suggest that in order for small patches or narrow corridors of retained forest in landscapes managed for oil palm to maintain biodiversity values in the long term, their sizes and widths need to adequately account for the considerable influence of edge effects

Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security