Assessing the conservation value of protected areas of Sabah in relation to the diversity of butterflies

• Main Author: Mazidi Abd Ghani
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English; English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: QH1-(199.5) General Including nature conservation, geographical distribution
• Online Access: https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/42660/1/24%20PAGES.pdf; https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/42660/2/FULLTEXT.pdf; https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/42660/

Biodiversity is declining as a result of many environmental factors, including habitat loss and global climate change. Some areas of natural habitats that remain are protected in order to conserve biodiversity, but the effectiveness of these Protected Areas (PAs) to protect sites of high conservation value has received little consideration. The main aims of this study were: (1) to investigate the potential impacts of climate warming on species’ distribution on Borneo and (2) to assess the current conservation value of PAs in Sabah based on species distribution data and land cover. A total of 22,274 records from 314 butterfly species (Papilionidae Pieridae, Nymphalidae) were included in the database. ‘Maxent’ ecological niche modelling was used to predict the potential distributions of butterflies (5 km grid cell resolution) based on 10 climate variables (temperature and precipitation) and forest cover. Model outputs showed that precipitation was the most important environmental variable in determining butterfly distributions for most species (>70% of species). Inclusion of forest cover into Maxent models improved model fitting, although it was rarely the most important variable in models (<8% of species). Butterfly distribution data (n = 176 species) were then incorporated into reserve-design software (‘Zonation’), together with forest availability, to assess the conservation value of PAs of Sabah (5 km grid cell resolution) in relation to forest connectivity and butterfly species richness and complementarity. There are 50 PAs in Sabah that cover 10.5% of the land area. Zonation output showed that PAs were more highly ranked than non-PAs. However, analysis of ‘high conservation priority areas’ (i.e. cells with Zonation rank score ≥ 0.7) showed that < 15% of these grid cells were in PAs. The Zonation score of PAs was positively related to their size, showing that large PAs have higher conservation value. However, the Zonation scores of some small PAs were as high as those for large PAs, suggesting that some small forest fragments are important for conservation. In conclusion, these results show that climate (particularly precipitation) exerts an important role in determining the distribution of butterflies of Borneo. PAs have higher conservation value than non-PAs, but only a small proportion of high conservation priority sites are currently protected, and deserve higher protection. Areas with high habitat connectivity are likely to be more effective at conserving biodiversity in the long term, and future work should investigate methods of improving and preserving habitat connectivity in order to conserve biodiversity.