Lower crop community structure and its implication on the availability of food substrate for the Javan Fuscous Langur

Abstract

Habitat degradation and fragmentation may provide the opportunity for succession allowing invasive species and many other lower crop communities to exist and contribute to the structure of the lower crop community. Mount Merbabu in Central Java is one of the protected areas in Java that has suffered from forest degradation and fragmentation, threatening the habitat of the endangered primate Javan Fuscous Langur Presbytis comata fredericae. Nowadays, invasive species have abundantly created a cover in the forest ground. This new lower vegetation structure may lead to some ecological consequences, including the quality and quantity of food substrate available for the langur. As the study on this new vegetation structure has not been carried out yet, therefore our research aims at examining the community structure of the lower vegetation on the forest ground. We analyzed the community properties based on the species richness and equitability that is expressed in the community's diversity index (H’). We engaged with the PAST Software to validate the value of the H’ index. The overall of our analysis and discussion stands in the context of linkage between the vegetation diversity and its service in providing a more diverse food source. This research found 122 plant taxa. As the species equitability is considered low, the overall value of the H’ index then falls into only 1.02 and 0.01, indicating a low-value diversity index. Most of the lower crop species were potentially serve as an alternative food resource for the Javan Fuscous Langur. The Javan Fuscous Langur may adaptively use this abundant ground crop to survive in the degraded forest.