Evaluating the impact of future climate and forest cover change on the ability of Southeast (SE) Asia’s protected areas to provide coverage to the habitats of threatened avian species

Abstract

Climate change and forest loss pose a significant threat to the long-term persistence of avian species in Southeast (SE) Asia. In this research, we assessed the impact of present and future climate and forest cover change on the ability of SE Asia’s protected areas (PAs) to provide coverage to the suitable habitats of 225 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)-listed threatened avian species. A minimum of 15 geolocation occurrence records were obtained per species. Variables describing present and future (2041–2060) climate scenarios and forest cover change were incorporated using a maximum entropy-based species distribution model (MaxEnt) to model the spatial distribution of suitable habitats. MaxEnt provides robust results with a small number of geolocational occurrences. It was discovered that present PA boundaries have limited overlap (<15%) with the most suitable present-day habitats of IUCN-listed critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable avian species. When future climate projections were considered in isolation, the overlap of the projected suitable habitats with PAs declined under the medium and high-emissions scenarios (A1B and A2) and increased under the optimistic low-emissions scenario (B2). However, when future forest cover was included, the overlap between projected suitable habitats and PAs declined for all future scenarios. The results establish that the PAs of SE Asia provide limited coverage of present-day suitable habitats of the region’s threatened avian species. Further, the projected highly suitable habitats for critically endangered and endangered avian species are projected to have no overlap with the current PAs of any of the countries of SE Asia under different future climate scenarios. These results provide a useful foundation for identifying locations for new PAs to improve the protection of important avian habitats.