Identifying Priority Areas for Conservation and Management in Diverse Tropical Forests

Karel Mokany,Soumya Prasad,David A Westcott,Andrew J Ford,Daniel J Metcalfe,Bruno Hérault

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0089084

Abstract

The high concentration of the world’s species in tropical forests endows these systems with particular importance for retaining global biodiversity, yet it also presents significant challenges for ecology and conservation science. The vast number of rare and yet to be discovered species restricts the applicability of species-level modelling for tropical forests, while the capacity of community classification approaches to identify priorities for conservation and management is also limited. Here we assessed the degree to which macroecological modelling can overcome shortfalls in our knowledge of biodiversity in tropical forests and help identify priority areas for their conservation and management. We used 527 plant community survey plots in the Australian Wet Tropics to generate models and predictions of species richness, compositional dissimilarity, and community composition for all the 4,313 vascular plant species recorded across the region (>1.3 million communities (grid cells)). We then applied these predictions to identify areas of tropical forest likely to contain the greatest concentration of species, rare species, endemic species and primitive angiosperm families. Synthesising these alternative attributes of diversity into a single index of conservation value, we identified two areas within the Australian wet tropics that should be a high priority for future conservation actions: the Atherton Tablelands and Daintree rainforest. Our findings demonstrate the value of macroecological modelling in identifying priority areas for conservation and management actions within highly diverse systems, such as tropical forests.

Highlights

Tropical rainforests contain more than 60% of all known species, despite covering only 7% of the earth’s surface [1,2]
As a consequence of the challenges faced in understanding diversity in tropical forests, ecologists have often relied upon community-level approaches to improve our knowledge of these systems
517 Queensland Herbarium survey plots occurred within the study region, many of these plots contained species which were only identified to family or genus level, which is inappropriate for accurately quantifying species richness and compositional dissimilarity

Summary

Introduction

Tropical rainforests contain more than 60% of all known species, despite covering only 7% of the earth’s surface [1,2]. The combination of high diversity and major shortfalls in our knowledge of tropical forest biodiversity limits the applicability of commonly applied species-level modelling approaches [5] in improving our understanding of current patterns in diversity. As a consequence of the challenges faced in understanding diversity in tropical forests, ecologists have often relied upon community-level approaches to improve our knowledge of these systems. This trend is typified in the Australian Wet Tropics, the largest area of tropical rainforest in Australia [6]. A long history of ecological research has applied and refined structural and compositional classification of tropical plant diversity into forest ‘‘types’’, ‘‘categories’’, or ‘‘regional ecosystems’’ [7,8,9,10,11,12]

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Conclusion