The conservation of animal species in their natural habitat is becoming increasingly difficult. Anthropogenic pressures continue to squeeze available habitat and force animals into degraded and disturbed areas. Ensuring the long-term survival of many animal species requires a well-developed understanding of how animals use these new landscapes, and how their behavior and distributions are affected by landuse changes. To better inform conservation strategies in disturbed areas, large-scale, accurate measurements of both habitat and animals use of it are required, which are difficult to obtain from on-the-ground measurements alone. Recent advances in Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) have enabled high-resolution measurements of animal habitat, and, when combined with animal distributional, abundance or behavioral data, can be a powerful tool for understanding how animals use disturbed landscapes, and how conservation strategies should adapt to these new environments. Here, we demonstrate the applicability of LiDAR for animal conservation using two contrasting examples: savanna termites in South Africa and Bornean orangutans in Malaysia.
Results/Conclusions
LiDAR data were used to directly measure the abundance and spatial patterning of termite mounds across a landuse gradient, revealing how mound dynamics are disrupted by human activities ranging from subsistence agriculture to settlement construction. Although mound spatial patterning was largely intact in communal grazing areas, mound densities were significantly reduced. Other landuse activities, such as agriculture and housing, led to widespread disruptions of both mound densities and spatial patterning. These alterations to mound dynamics could have large-scale detrimental effects on ecosystem functioning in these areas given the important ecological roles performed by termites. To gain insights into how orangutans use human-modified forests, we combined detailed visual observations of Bornean orangutan movements with LiDAR data on forest canopy attributes. Structural attributes of the upper forest canopy were the dominant determinant of orangutan movement among all age and sex classes, with orangutans more likely to move in directions of increased canopy closure, tall trees, and uniform height, as well as avoiding canopy gaps and moving toward emergent crowns. These results suggest that although orangutans do make use of disturbed forest, they select certain canopy attributes within these forests, indicating that not all disturbed forest is of equal value for the long-term sustainability of orangutan populations. Although the value of disturbed habitats needs to be recognized in animal conservation plans, minimal ecological requirements within these habitats also need to be understood and considered if long-term population viability is to be realized.