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The state and conservation of Southeast Asian biodiversity, Group Member,…
The state and conservation of Southeast Asian biodiversity
Deforestation rates in Southeast Asia
From the figure 2(a):
Southeast Asia's
annual deforestation rate was the HIGHEST among all tropical regions from 1990 to 2000.
South America's
annual deforestation rate was the LOWEST among all tropical regions from 1990 to 2000.
Overall, all tropical region's annual deforestation rate show the INCREASING trend from 2000 to 2005.
Illegal logging
is also destroying and degrading the majority of the region's protected forests.
Less than 10% of the forests in Southeast Asia are protected.
From the figure 2(b):
The remaining natural forest area of
Southeast Asia
is the SMALLEST while the remaining natural forest area of
South America
was the LARGEST.
Overall: The remaining natural forest area of all tropical region was decreased from 1990 to 2005.
Conclusions and Recommendations
The available evidence indicates that the biodiversity in Southeast Asia is very susceptible to the negative impacts of habitat loss.
The successful resolution of extensive and persistent environmental issues necessitates collaboration at both regional and global levels. Given the significant diversity in problems and potential solutions within Southeast Asia, the region is confronted with a tough challenge.
Conservation activities need to step up and incorporate public education, livelihood support, measures to improve agriculture's sustainability, and building conservation organizations' capability.
In order to restore and enhance the ecological integrity of these landscapes, it is recommended to reforestation, reintroduce, and repair habitat links that have been disrupted.
It is strongly recommended that nations with higher affluence, such as Brunei Darussalam and Singapore, increase their investments in conservation programs inside less affluent countries in the region, such as Indonesia and the Philippines. Singapore, for instance, can teach biologists from the area and offer advice on how to best manage the environment.
Broader networks can be established with nations such as Japan and Australia to allow capacity building and biodiversity information sharing.
The dependence of rural populations on natural resources should be reduced for practical conservation by generating jobs like nature guides.
To reduce corruption in order to manage Southeast Asia's "natural capital" effectively
To stop the criminal trade in animals and wood, people in the region and beyond (for example, China and South Korea) will need to work together.
Southeast Asian Biodiversity
Known hotspot of biodiversity, and is of threat
Major biogeographic units made of
Sundaland
Wallacea
Indochina / Indo burma
Philippines
IUCN data at a country level show that if mammals, birds, and amphibians are analyzed at a family level, SE Asian countries have the highest global diversity for a number of taxa.
This region is home to almost one-fifth of the planet's plant and animal species;
one-third of coastal and marine habitats;
such as coastal wetlands, marine protected areas, open oceans and pelagic zones, coral triangle
one-third of the world's coral reef species, more than half of tropical peatlands;
600 coral reefs species are in Southeast Asia
almost half of the world's mangrove areas, despite occupying only three percent of the planet's total land area.
Southeast Asia contains the highest mean proportion of country-endemic bird (9%) and mammal species (11%).
SE Asia also is home to the second-highest proportion of country-endemic vascular plant species (25%) compared to the other tropical regions of Meso-America, South America, and SubSaharan Africa.
SE Asia also has the highest proportion of threatened species across all taxonomic groups (i.e., vascular plants, reptiles,
birds and mammals) except amphibians.
Human density, deforestation and biodiversity endangerment
Human Density
• Human population growth and rising resource demands are key factors driving land transformation and resulting biodiversity losses.
• High human population densities correlate with an increased risk to biodiversity, with a particular emphasis on this relationship in Southeast Asia.
• A negative relationship is established between human population density and the proportion of remaining forested areas.
• As population density rises, forests are more susceptible to threats such as conversion to agriculture or urbanization and logging for timber.
Deforestation
Replace for agricultural or urban areas, or
logged to provide timber.
Forests in heavily populated areas also remain vulnerable to overharvesting
Major threat in Malaysia is commercial logging (top tropical log producer and exporter from 2004–2007)
Biodiversity Endangerment
As population densities and urban populations increase, so do red-listed species as well as threatened birds.
Importance of conservation in both natural ecosystems and urban areas.
INTRODUCTION
Southeast Asia
is considered a tropical
biodiversity hotspot
and stands out as a significant
conservation concern
due to its leading rate of
habitat loss
, up to >70% of original habitats.
Southeast Asia confronts extinctions from human-driven land-use changes amid challenges like environmental apathy, corruption, poor governance, poverty, and limited conservation funding.
Projected biotic extinctions from Southeast Asia
log-linear species–area relationship (SAR)
Relationship between habitat area and the number of species of a region.
Utilized to predict future extinctions in Southeast Asia from deforestation.
It was predicted that 13- 42% of all species in Southeast Asia would be lost by 2100 due to loss of 72-90% of habitat area.
It was also estimated that in this century, 24–63% of Southeast Asian endemic taxa that consists of 859–4,815 vertebrate species and 8,343–48,043 species of vascular plants were at risk of extinction due to deforestation.
However, SAR-based projections are a blunt tool for assessing biodiversity loss in the future because they ignore real-world feedbacks on extinction risk, which can be both positive and negative. For example, tropical forests that were cleared in the past are now re-establishing as secondary forests. There is also evidence that a good proportion of forest species can survive in secondary forests.
Despite the above mentioned biases in these SAR-projections, extinctions are still likely been underestimated due to
additional impacts of unmodelled factors
like:
climate change
invasive competitors and predators
increase in the amount of forest cleared due to the rising demand for mature rainforest timber on the market.
habitat fragmentation also inevitably caused by deforestation
the logging trails that enable the hunter to access to forest interiors
forest fragmentation, loss of forest cover, and global climate change can cause a localised druing around edges of the rain forest patches, regional drop in evapo-transpiration rate, and wide scale shifts in rainfall because of disruption of the Indian monsoon and El Nino-La Nina cycle, all possibility of increasing fire risk, loss of water and thermal stress.
All these unknowns bias of SAR extinction are all underestimated. Therefore, the region will be substantially more vulnerable than is already predicted by the majority of genuine (but unknown) consequences or synergies.
Improvement for prediction of biotic extinction in Southeast Asia.
Subsequent investigations that will concentrate on measuring these broad observations or theoretical anticipations. (
eg
: a detailed longitudinal study of different types of habitat to understand the extent and time period for the faunal relaxation after disturbance and the recoverance of the species diversity following the habitat restoration.)
The satellite monitoring of Southeast Asian forests has produced and will continue to produce the kind of reliable geographic data on rates of forest regeneration required for more thorough forecasts of future forest cover and these information should be officially verified as much as possible.
Estimates of the regional trends in rainfall and temperature changes that would impact biodiversity will become more clear with continuous development in the down-scaled projections of atmosphere-ocean coupled global circulation climate models (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007).
It is highly likely that more accurate estimates of extinction rates for Southeast Asia will surface if this data can be sufficiently integrated with models of fire and vegetation change. However, the unsettlingly wide SAR-based projections of 13–85% extinctions by 2100 are as accurate as we can currently get given the existing boundaries of knowledge.
Group Member
Cheng Yong Xing (79054)
Muhammad Danial bin Ramli (80216)
Viviana Anyaputri Tanurahardja (97890)
Macarena Douglas (81849)
Olivia Angelyn Letchumi (80922)
Yeap Mandy (81535)
Liu Siew Ying (79901)
Zulhilmi bin Mohamad Ismail (81569)
Angeline Amelinda Palit (97885)
Lim Xinyue (79887)