Testing the benefits of conservation set-asides for improved habitat connectivity in tropical agricultural landscapes

1. Habitat connectivity is important for tropical biodiversity
conservation. Expansion of commodity crops, such as oil palm, fragments
natural habitat areas, and strategies are needed to improve habitat
connectivity in agricultural landscapes. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm
Oil (RSPO) voluntary certification system requires that growers identify
and conserve forest patches identified as High Conservation Value Areas
(HCVAs) before oil palm plantations can be certified as sustainable. We
assessed the potential benefits of these conservation set-asides for forest
connectivity.

2. We mapped HCVAs and quantified their forest cover in 2015. To assess
their contribution to forest connectivity, we modelled range expansion of
forest-dependent populations with five dispersal abilities spanning those
representative of poor dispersers (e.g., flightless insects) to more mobile
species (e.g., large birds or bats) across 70 plantation landscapes in
Borneo.

3. Because only 21% o...