Abstract
Oil palm plantations are a major agricultural land use in Southeast Asia. In the coming decades large areas of mature oil palm will be cleared and replanted. To inform more sustainable long-term production in this globally important crop, it is crucial we understand how replanting impacts ecosystem functions and services. We investigated whether several production-relevant ecosystems functions (dung removal, soil mesofauna feeding activity, herbivory, herbivore predation, and seed predation), and the simultaneous delivery of all functions (ecosystem multifunctionality), vary between recently-replanted oil palm (1-4 yr) and mature oil palm (23-30 yr) areas. Following new in-country and Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) guidelines, riparian buffers of mature oil palm, in which subsequent natural regrowth is allowed, are being preserved during the replanting cycle in plantations that lack natural forest reserves. We investigated whether or not mature oil palm riparian buffers maintain levels of ecosystem functioning beneficial for palm oil production. Only one function (herbivory) differed between mature and replanted areas, with higher levels of herbivory found in recently replanted oil palm. There was no difference in ecosystem multifunctionality between mature and recently-replanted oil palm. Mature oil palm riparian buffers were found to be valuable for maintaining lower levels of herbivory than recently-replanted oil palm. However, no other functions, nor ecosystem multifunctionality, differed between the mature oil palm riparian buffers and recently-replanted oil palm. The results of this study suggest that replanting has limited impacts on the ecosystem functions we considered. Furthermore, they suggest mature oil palm riparian buffers do not have negative impacts on production-relevant ecosystem functions in oil palm landscapes.
Highlights
Oil palm plantations are a major agricultural land use in Southeast Asia (Foster et al, 2011; Food Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 2017)
Ecosystem Functioning in Mature Oil Palm Riparian Buffers To investigate whether ecosystem functions, and multifunctionality, are maintained within mature oil palm riparian buffers, we looked for interactions between distance into oil palm and the three vegetation types
This study found that recently replanted oil palm (1–4 years) had similar levels of ecosystem functioning to mature oil palm (23– 30 years), levels of herbivory were higher in recently replanted oil palm
Summary
Oil palm plantations are a major agricultural land use in Southeast Asia (Foster et al, 2011; Food Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 2017). The expansion of oil palm in Southeast Asia has contributed toward the widespread and large-scale conversion of forested land and has been a major factor driving biodiversity loss (Edwards et al, 2010; Meijaard et al, 2018). Large scale oil palm planting began in the region in the mid1980s and large areas of mature oil palm plantation are due to be cleared and replanted in the coming decade as the palms reach the end of their productive lifespan (Snaddon et al, 2013). Replanted areas of oil palm have been found to contain lower frog species richness than mature oil palm (Kurz et al, 2016), while other studies have demonstrated that the composition of bird and ant communities vary with oil palm age (Desmier De Chenon and Susanto, 2006; Wang and Foster, 2016)
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