Oil palm plantations fail to support mammal diversity

Agricultural expansion is the largest threat to global biodiversity. In particular, the rapid spread of tree plantations is a primary driver of deforestation in hyperdiverse tropical regions. Plantations tend to support considerably lower biodiversity than native forest, but it remains unclear whether plantation traits affect their ability to sustain native wildlife populations, particularly for threatened taxa. If animal diversity varies across plantations with different characteristics, these traits could be manipulated to make plantations more “wildlife friendly.” The degree to which plantations create edge effects that degrade habitat quality in adjacent forest also remains unclear, limiting our ability to predict wildlife persistence in mixed-use landscapes. We used systematic camera trapping to investigate mammal occurrence and diversity in oil palm plantations and adjacent forest in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Mammals within plantations were largely constrained to locations near nat...

农业扩张是全球生物多样性面临的首要威胁。具体而言，人工林的快速扩张是超多样热带地区森林砍伐的核心驱动因素。人工林所支撑的生物多样性通常远低于原生林，但目前仍不明确人工林的特征是否会影响其维持本土野生动物种群的能力，尤其是针对受威胁类群。若不同特征的人工林间动物多样性存在差异，便可通过调控这些特征，使人工林更具“野生动物友好性”。此外，人工林产生的边缘效应是否会降低邻近原生林的生境质量，这一问题尚未得到明确解答，这也限制了我们对混合土地利用景观中野生动物存续状况的预测能力。本研究采用系统性相机诱捕法，对马来西亚婆罗洲沙巴地区的油棕种植园及其邻近原生林内的哺乳动物出现情况与多样性展开调查。种植园内的哺乳动物大多被限制在靠近原生