A diverse community of 63 rodent species and nine
treeshrew species are found in Borneo (Phillipps &
Phillipps, 2016). They play an important role in
providing ecosystem services by contributing to
pollination, seed dispersal, and germination; and
also food for larger carnivores (Shanahan &
Compton, 2000; Morand et al., 2006; Payne &
Francis, 2007; Phillipps & Phillipps, 2016). Bornean
tropical forests have been lost, degraded, and
fragmented by anthropogenic activities since the
early 1970s (Bryan et al., 2013; Gaveau et al., 2014),
consequently created new or alternative habitats for
rodents and treeshrews especially resilient, adaptive,
or opportunistic species that can thrive in such
disturbed areas while forest-dependent species
would decline in number or become locally extinct
(Traweger et al., 2006; Palmeirim et al., 2020).
This study was conducted to determine the
species richness and abundance of rodents and
treeshrews in four different habitats (i.e. forest, oil
palm plantation, rural villages, and urban area) in
the western part of Sarawak, Borneo. The data
collected from this study is important and useful in
contributing new knowledge on the occupancy of
anthropogenically created habitats for rodents and
treeshrews and gives an insight into how each
rodent and treeshrew species responded to human
disturbance in term of their species richness and
abundance in each habitat type
