Abstract

The Leuser Ecosystem is one of the essential landscapes in the world for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. However, the Leuser Ecosystem has suffered many threats from anthropogenic activities and changing climate. Climate change is the greatest challenge to global biodiversity conservation. Efforts should be made to elaborate climatic change metrics toward biological conservation practices. Herein, we present several climate change metrics to support conservation management toward mammal species in the Leuser Ecosystem. We used a 30-year climate of mean annual temperature, annual precipitation, and the BIOCLIM data to capture the current climatic conditions. For the future climate (2050), we retrieved three downscaled general circulation models for the business-as-usual scenario of shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP585). We calculated the dissimilarities of the current and 2050 climatic conditions using the standardized Euclidean distance (SED). To capture the probability of climate extremes in each period (i.e., current and future conditions), we calculated the 5th and 95th percentiles of the distributions of monthly temperature and precipitation, respectively, in the current and future conditions. Furthermore, we calculated forward and backward climate velocities based on the mean annual temperature. These metrics can be useful inferences about species conservation. Our results indicate that almost all of the endangered mammals in the Leuser Ecosystem will occur in the area with threats to local populations and sites. Different conservation strategies should be performed in the areas likely to present different threats toward mammal species. Habitat restoration and long-term population monitoring are needed to support conservation in this mega biodiversity region.

Highlights

  • The Leuser Ecosystem is one of the essential landscapes in the world for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services (Le Saout et al, 2013)

  • We evaluated protected areas within the Leuser Ecosystem based on climate change metrics and mammal species richness

  • The results suggest that protected area is more susceptible to climate change than the unprotected areas within the Leuser Ecosystem based on standardized Euclidean distance (SED) values (Kolmogorov–Smirnov test; D 0.20397, p-value < 0.005)

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Summary

Introduction

The Leuser Ecosystem is one of the essential landscapes in the world for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services (Le Saout et al, 2013) It harbors various ecoregions such as tropical lowland and montane rainforests, coastal ecosystem, and peatland areas (Olson et al, 2001). This landscape represents the most critical refugia for many endangered mammals in Asia, for example, Sumatran orangutan, elephant, tiger, and rhinoceros, including a massive endemic diversity plant species (Cochard, 2017). The previous study showed that the Leuser Ecosystem would experience significant biodiversity extirpations due to climate and habitat changes (Wich et al, 2016; Condro et al, 2021). Measuring the climate change impacts on biodiversity within the Leuser Ecosystem should be carried out to point out future conservation strategies

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