Data from: 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 native forest; the
occurrence of most species and overall species richness declined abruptly
with decreasing forest proximity from an estimated 14 species at the
forest ecotone to ~1 species 2 km into the plantation. Neither tree height
nor canopy cover within plantations strongly affected mammal diversity or
occurrence, suggesting that manipulating tree spacing or planting cycles
might not make plantations more wildlife friendly. Plantations did not
appear to generate strong edge effects; mammal richness within forest
remained high and consistent up to the plantation ecotone. Our results
suggest that land-sparing strategies, as opposed to efforts to make
plantations more wildlife-friendly, are required for regional wildlife
conservation in biodiverse tropical ecosystems.