Impact of oil palm plantation on herpetofauna species diversity at PT Waimusi Agroindah South Sumatera

Abstract

Oil palm plantation playing an important role in Indonesia’s economic development, whereas generates the largest foreign exchange and boosts communities’ economic sector, also absorbs the workforce. However, there are some accusation to oil palm plantation that it caused biodiversity decreased in the minimum of 60%. The study was done to identify the impact of oil palm plantations on herpetofauna diversity, community similarity and percentage loss or gain of community. The observation was done using Visual Encounter Survey (VES) method in the 6 land cover types which classified into 2 land areas. Rubber plantation and shrubs were considered as the land cover before the oil palm plantation establishment. While, young, intermediate, old oil palm plantation and high conservation value forest were considered as the land covers after the plantation establishment. The study was conducted in May 2017 in the South Sumatera Province. The data analysis showed that old palm plantation had a higher species number (19 species) compared to rubber plantation (11 species) and shrubs land cover (3 species). However, rubber plantation and old oil palm plantation had the highest species composition similarity (IS = 0.62). While the lowest happened in both shrubs-old oil palm plantation and shrubs-conservation area (IS = 0.19). The transformation land cover into oil palm plantations led to the gain of herpetofauna species as many as 8 species for rubber plantation and 17 species for shrub, while on the other hand only cause loss of 1 species from shrub and no one species loss for rubber plantation.