The ecological impacts of human-modified landscapes on vertebrate communities in Southeast Asia

Moore, Jonathan Harry (2024) The ecological impacts of human-modified landscapes on vertebrate communities in Southeast Asia. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Hydropower development and oil palm agriculture are two of the most important drivers of habitat fragmentation and degradation of tropical forests globally. This thesis assesses how these human modified landscapes are impacting vertebrate communities in Southeast Asia. Using a dataset from an archipelago of island forest fragments embedded within a hydroelectric reservoir in Thailand spanning three decades, my second chapter documents the near-complete collapse of a small mammal community driven by the generalist Malayan field rat, which outcompeted all other native species and accelerated their local extinction rates. In chapter three, I combined data from chapter one with two other hydropower reservoirs in Southeast Asia – spanning a gradient of human disturbance – to assess the role habitat degradation plays in the species-area relationship (SAR). The collapse of SARs in degraded landscapes emphasized the impacts of habitat degradation along with hyperabundant generalists on small mammal species richness, improving conventional SAR predictions. In chapter four, using camera trap surveys across the same sites as chapter two, I reveal that adding a proxy for habitat degradation to the equilibrium theory of island biogeography (ETIB) improves the power of this well establish ecological framework to predict vertebrate responses to habitat fragmentation. In chapter five, I used a regional camera trapping dataset to quantify the rise of hyperabundant native generalists – wild pigs and macaques – in proximity to oil palm dominated landscapes throughout Southeast Asia. While most species are suffering in these human altered forests, a few species have benefited greatly; understanding the traits that may predispose species to benefit from land-use change and their consequences on the ecosystem will be paramount in decades ahead. My thesis contributes towards our understanding of how increasing proliferation of hydroelectric dams and oil palm will drive changes in ecological communities, species distributions and their interactions with humans.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
Depositing User:	Kitty Laine
Date Deposited:	12 Nov 2024 11:26
Last Modified:	12 Nov 2024 11:26
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97638
DOI:

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